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THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE 
TO COME 



By the Same Author 
JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 

(Third Printing) 



THERE'S PIPPINS 

AND 

CHEESETOCDME 

BY 
CMRLES 5. BROOKS 

Illustratea bj 
Thedore DiedricKsenJr. 




NEWHWEN:TiALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LQND0N:ffl]MPHREYMILFOia) 

OXEIOED 1MVEESITYE8ESS 

MDCCCCXVtt 



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Copyright, 1917 
By Yale University Press 



First published, September, 1917 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

The Yale University Press makes grateful acknowledgment 
to the Editors of the Yale Review and of the New Republic for 
permission to include in the present work essays of which 
they were the original publishers. 



OCT 26 1917 



/^^ 



©Gi,A47i:;799 



TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. There's Pippins and Cheese to Come . 1 

II. On Buying Old Books 15 

III. Any Stick Will Do to Beat a Dog . 28 

IV. Roads of Morning 40 

V. The Man of Grub Street Comes from 

His Garret 58 

VI. Now that Spring is Here .... 68 

VII. The Friendly Genii 75 

VIII. Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit ... . 83 

IX. To an Unknown Reader ..... 93 

X. A Plague of All Cowards .... 101 
XI. The Asperities of the Early British 

Reviewers 110 

XII. The Pursuit of Fire 127 



THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE 
TO COME 



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^ I N MY noonday quest for food, if 
the day is fine, it is my habit to shun 
the nearer places of refreshment. 
I take the air and stretch myself. 
Like Eve's serpent I go upright for 
a bit. Yet if time presses, there 
may be had next door a not un- 
savory stowage. A drinking bar is 
nearest to the street where its pol- 
ished brasses catch the eye. It holds 
a gilded mirror to such red-faced 
nature as consorts within. Yet you 
pass the bar and come upon a range 
of tables at the rear. 
Now, if you yield to the habits of the place you 
order a rump of meat. Gravy lies about it like a moat 
around a castle, and if there is in you the zest for 
encounter, you attack it above these murky waters. 
"This castle hath a pleasant seat," you cry, and charge 
upon it with pike advanced. But if your appetite is 
one to peck and mince, the whiffs that breathe upon 
the place come unwelcome to your nostrils. In no 




PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



wise are they like the sweet South upon your senses. 
There is even a suspicion in you — such is your dis- 
temper — that it is too much a witch's cauldron in the 
kitchen, "eye of newt, and toe of frog," and you spy 
and poke upon your food. Bus boys bear off the 
crockery as though they were apprenticed to a 
juggler and were only at the beginning of their art. 
Waiters bawl strange messages to the cook. It's a 
tongue unguessed by learning, yet sharp and potent. 
Also, there comes a riot from the kitchen, and steam 
issues from the door as though the devil himself were 
a partner and conducted here an upper branch. 
Like the man in the old comedy, your belly may still 
ring dinner, but the tinkle is faint. Such being your 
state, you choose a daintier place to eat. 

Having now set upon a longer journey — the day 
being fine and the sidewalks thronged — you pass by a 
restaurant that is but a few doors up the street. A 
fellow in a white coat flops pancakes in the window. 
But even though the pancake does a double somer- 
sault and there are twenty curious noses pressed 
against the glass, still you keep your course uptown. 

Nor are you led off because a near-by stairway 
beckons you to a Chinese restaurant up above. A 
golden dragon swings over the door. Its race has 
fallen since its fire-breathing grandsire guarded the 
fruits of the Hesperides. Are not "soys" and "chou 
meins" and other such treasures of the East laid out 
above? And yet the dragon dozes at its post like a 
sleepy dog. No flame leaps up its gullet. The swish 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 3 

of its tail is stilled. If it wag at all, it's but in friend- 
ship or because a gust of wind has stirred it from 
its dreams. 

I have wondered why Chinese restaurants are 
generally on the second story. A casual inquiry 
attests it. I know of one, it is true, on the ground 
level, yet here I suspect a special economy. The 
place had formerly been a German restaurant, with 
Teuton scrolls, "Ich Dien," and heraldries on its 
walls. A frugal brush changed the decoration. 
From the heart of a Prussian blazonry, there flares 
on you in Chinese yellow a recommendation to try 
"Our Chicken Chop Soy." The quartering of the 
House of HohenzoUern wears a baldric in praise of 
"Subgum Noodle Warmein," which it seems they 
cook to an unusual delicacy. Even a wall painting 
of Rip Van Winkle bowling at tenpins in the 
mountains is now set off with a pigtail. But the 
chairs were Dutch and remain as such. Generally, 
however, Chinese restaurants are on the second story. 
Probably there is a ritual from the ancient days of 
Ming Ti that Chinamen when they eat shall sit as 
near as possible to the sacred moon. 

But hold a bit! In your haste up town to find a 
place to eat, you are missing some of the finer sights 
upon the way. In these windows that you pass, the 
merchants have set their choicest wares. If there is 
any commodity of softer gloss than common, or one 
shinier to the eye — so that your poverty frets you — 
it is displayed here. In the window of the haber- 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



dasher, shirts — ^mere torsos with not a leg below or 
head above — yet disport themselves in gay neck- 
wear. Despite their dismemberment they are tricked 
to the latest turn of fashion. Can vanity survive 
such general amputation? Then there is hope for 
immortality. 

But by what sad chance have these blithe fellows 
been disjointed? If a gloomy mood prevails in you — 
as might come from a bad turn of the market — 
you fancy that the evil daughter of Herodias still 
lives around the corner, and that she has set out her 
victims to the general view. If there comes a hurdy- 
gurdy on the street and you cock your ear to the tune 
of it, you may still hear the dancing measure of her 
wicked feet. Or it is possible that these are the 
kindred of Holofernes and that they have supped 
guiltily in their tents with a sisterhood of Judiths. 

Or we may conceive — our thoughts running now 
to food — that these gamesome creatures of the haber- 
dasher had dressed themselves for a more recent 
banquet. Their black-tailed coats and glossy shirts 
attest a rare occasion. It was in holiday mood, when 
they were fresh-combed and perked in their best, that 
they were cut off from life. It would appear that 
Jack Ketch the headsman got them when they were 
rubbed and shining for the feast. We'll not squint 
upon his writ. It is enough that they were appre- 
hended for some rascality. When he came thumping 
on his dreadful summons, here they were already set, 
fopped from shoes to head in the newest whim. 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



Spoon in hand and bib across their knees — lest 
they fleck their careful fronts — they waited for 
the anchovy to come. And on a sudden they were cut 
off from life, unfit, unseasoned for the passage. Like 
the elder Hamlet's brother, they were engaged upon 
an act that had no relish of salvation in it. You may 
remember the lamentable child somewhere in Dickens, 
who because of an abrupt and distressing accident, 
had a sandwich in its hand but no mouth to put it in. 
Or perhaps you recall the cook of the Nancy Bell 
and his grievous end. The poor fellow was stewed 
in his own stew-pot. It was the Elderly Naval Man, 
you recall — the two of them being the ship's sole 
survivors on the deserted island, and both of them 
lean with hunger — it was the Elderly Naval Man 
(the villain of the piece) who "ups with his heels, and 
smothers his squeals in the scum of the boiling broth." 

And yet by looking on these torsos of the haber- 
dasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mor- 
tality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things 
that they hold dear — canes, gloves, silk hats, and the 
newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle — 
are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they 
fingers they would be smoothing themselves before 
the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may 
be, are still smiling on the world, despite their 
divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with a 
jest, their lips still parted for the anchovy to come. 

A few days since, as I was thinking — for so I am 
pleased to call my muddy stirrings — what manner of 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



essay I might write and how best to sort and lay out 
the rummage, it happened pat to my needs that I 
received from a friend a book entitled "The Closet 
of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened." Now, 
before it came I had got so far as to select a title. 
Indeed, I had written the title on seven different 
sheets of paper, each time in the hope that by the 
run of the words I might leap upon some further 
thought. Seven times I failed and in the end the 
sheets went into the waste basket, possibly to the 
confusion of Annie our cook, who may have mistaken 
them for a reiterated admonishment towards the 
governance of her kitchen — at the least, a hint of my 
desires and appetite for cheese and pippins. 

"The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened" is a 
cook book. It is due you to know this at once, other- 
wise your thoughts — if your nature be vagrant — 
would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the 
domestic traits prevail and you would think of dress- 
clothes hanging in camphorated bags and a row of 
winter boots upon a shelf. 

I am disqualified to pass upon the merits of a cook 
book, for the reason that I have little discrimination 
in food. It is not that I am totally indifferent to 
what lies on the platter. Indeed, I have more than 
a tribal aversion to pork in general, while, on the other 
hand, I quicken joyfully when noodles are inter- 
spersed with bacon. I have a tooth for sweets, too, 
although I hold it unmanly and deny it as I can. I 
am told also — although I resent it — ^that my eye 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



lights up on the appearance of a tray of French 
pastry. I admit gladly, however, my love of onions, 
whether they come hissing from the skillet, or lie in 
their first tender whiteness. They are at their best 
when they are placed on bread and are eaten largely 
at midnight after society has done its worst. 

A fine dinner is lost within me. A quail is but an 
inferior chicken — a poor relation outside the exclu- 
sive hennery. Terrapin sits low in my regard, even 
though it has wallowed in the most aristocratic marsh. 
Through such dinners I hack and saw my way 
without even gaining a memory of my progress. If 
asked the courses, I balk after the recital of the soup. 
Indeed, I am so forgetful of food, even when I dine 
at home, that I can well believe that Adam when he 
was questioned about the apple was in real confusion. 
He had or he had not. It was mixed with the pome- 
granate or the quince that Eve had sliced and cooked 
on the day before. 

A dinner at its best is brought to a single focus. 
There is one dish to dominate the cloth, a single bulk 
to which all other dishes are subordinate. If there be 
turkey, it should mount from a central platter. Its 
protruding legs out-top the candles. All other foods 
are, as it were, privates in Csesar's army. They do 
no more than flank the pageant. Nor may the pantry 
hold too many secrets. Within reason, everything 
should be set out at once, or at least a gossip of its 
coming should run before. Otherwise, if the stew is 
savory, how shall one reserve a corner for the custard? 



8 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

One must partition himself justly — else, by an over- 
stowage at the end, he list and sink. 

I am partial to picnics — the spreading of the cloth 
in the woods or beside a stream — although I am not 
avid for sandwiches unless hunger press me. Rather, 
let there be a skillet in the company and let a fire be 
started! Nor need a picnic consume the day. In 
summer it requires but the late afternoon, with such 
borrowing of the night as is necessary for the journey 
home. You leave the street car, clanking with your 
bundles like an itinerant tinman. You follow a 
stream, which on these lower stretches, it is sad to 
say, is already infected with the vices of the city. 
Like many a countryman who has come to town, it 
has fallen to dissipation. It shows the marks of the 
bottle. Further up, its course is cleaner. You cross 
it in the mud. Was it not Christian who fell into the 
bog because of the burden on his back? Then you 
climb a villainously long hill and pop out upon an 
open platform above the city. 

The height commands a prospect to the west. 
Below is the smoke of a thousand suppers. Up from 
the city there comes the hum of life, now somewhat 
fallen with the traffic of the day — as though Nature 
already practiced the tune for sending her creatures 
off to sleep. You light a fire. The baskets disgorge 
their secrets. Ants and other leviathans think evi- 
dently that a circus has come or that bears are in the 
town. The chops and bacon achieve their appointed 
destiny. You throw the last bone across your 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 9 

shoulder. It slips and rattles to the river. The sun 
sets. Night like an ancient dame puts on her jewels: 

And now that I have climbed and won this height, 
I must tread downward through the sloping shade 
And travel the bewildered tracks till night. 
Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed 
And see the gold air and the silver fade 
And the last bird fly into the last light. 

By these confessions you will see how unfit I am 
to comment on the old cook book of Sir Kenelm 
Digby. Yet it lies before me. It may have escaped 
your memory in the din of other things, that in the 
time when Oliver Cromwell still walked the earth, 
there lived in England a man by the name of Kenelm 
Digby, who was renowned in astrology and alchemy, 
piracy, wit, philosophy and fashion. It appears that 
wherever learning wagged its bulbous head. Sir 
Kenelm was of the company. It appears, also, that 
wherever the mahogany did most groan, wherever 
the possets were spiced most delicately to the nose, 
there too did Sir Kenelm bib and tuck himself. With 
profundity, as though he sucked wisdom from its 
lowest depth, he spouted forth on the transmutation 
of the baser metals or tossed you a phrase from 
Paracelsus. Or with long instructive finger he 
dissertated on the celestial universe. One would have 
thought that he had stood by on the making of it and 
that his judgment had prevailed in the larger 
problems. Yet he did not neglect his trencher. 



10 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

And now as time went on, the richness of the food 
did somewhat dominate his person. The girth of his 
wisdom grew no less, but his body fattened. In a 
word, the good gentleman's palate came to vie with 
his intellect. Less often was he engaged upon some 
dark saying of Isidore of Seville. Rather, even if 
his favorite topic astrology were uppermost about 
the table, his eye travelled to the pantry on every 
change of dishes. His fingers, too, came to curl most 
delicately on his fork. He used it like an epicure, 
poking his viands apart for sharpest scrutiny. His 
nod upon a compote was much esteemed. 

Now mark his further decline! On an occasion — 
surely the old rascal's head is turned! — ^he would be 
found in private talk with his hostess, the Lady of 
Middlesex, or with the Countess of Monmouth, not 
as you might expect, on the properties of fire or on 
the mortal diseases of man, but — on subjects quite 
removed. Society, we may be sure, began to whisper 
of these snug parleys in the arbor after dinner, these 
shadowed mumblings on the balcony when the moon 
was up — and Lady Digby stiffened into watchfulness. 
It was when they took leave that she saw the 
Countess slip a note into her lord's fingers. Her 
jealousy broke out. "Viper!" She spat the words 
and seized her husband's wrist. Of course the note 
was read. It proved, however, that Sir Kenelm was 
innocent of all mischief. To the disappointment of 
the gossips, who were tuned to a spicier anticipation, 
the note was no more than a recipe of the manner that 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 11 

the Countess was used to mix her syllabub, with 
instruction that it was the "rosemary a little bruised 
and the limon-peal that did quicken the taste." 
Advice, also, followed in the postscript on the making 
of tea, with counsel that "the boiling water should 
remain upon it just so long as one might say a 
miserere." A mutual innocence being now estab- 
lished, the Lady Digby did by way of apology peck 
the Countess on the cheek. 

Sir Kenelm died in 1665, full of years. In that 
day his fame rested chiefly on his books in physic and 
chirurgery. His most enduring work was still to be 
pubhshed— "The Closet Opened." 

It was two years after his death that his son came 
upon a bundle of his father's papers that had hitherto 
been overlooked. I fancy that he went spying in the 
attic on a rainy day. In the darkest corner, behind 
the rocking horse — if such devices were known in 
those distant days — ^he came upon a trunk of his 
father's papers. "Od's fish," said Sir Kenelm's son, 
"here's a box of manuscripts. It is like that they 
pertain to alchemy or chirurgery." He pulled out a 
bundle and held it to the light — such light as came 
through the cobwebs of the ancient windows. "Here 
be strange matters," he exclaimed. Then he read 
aloud: "My Lord of Bristol's Scotch collops are 
thus made : Take a leg of fine sweet mutton, that to 
make it tender, is kept as long as possible may be 
without stinking. In winter seven or eight days" — 
"Ho! Ho!" cried Sir Kenelm's son. "This is not 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



alchemy!" He drew out another parchment and read 
again: "My Lord of Carlile's sack posset, how it's 
made: Take a pottle of cream and boil in it a little 
whole cinnamon and three or four flakes of mace. 
Boil it until it simpreth and bubbleth." 

By this time, as you may well imagine, Sir 
Kenelm's son was wrought to an excitement. It is 
likely that he inherited his father's palate and that 
the juices of his appetite were stirred. Seizing an 
armful of the papers, he leaped down the attic steps, 
three at a time. His lady mother thrust a curled and 
papered head from her door and asked whether the 
chimney were afire, but he did not heed her. The 
cook was waddling in her pattens. He cried to her 
to throw wood upon the fire. 

That night the Digby household was served a 
delicacy, red herrings broiled in the fashion of my 
Lord d'Aubigny, "short and crisp and laid upon a 
sallet." Also, there was a wheaten flommery as it 
was made in the West Country — for the cook chose 
quite at random — and a slip-coat cheese as Master 
Phillips proportioned it. Also, against the colic, 
which was ravishing the country, the cook prepared 
a metheglin as Lady Stuart mixed it — "nettles, 
fennel and grumel seeds, of each two ounces being 
small- cut and mixed with honey and boiled together." 
It is on record that the Lady Digby smiled for the 
first time since her lord had died, and when the 
grinning cook bore in the platter, she beat upon the 
table with her spoon. 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



13 



The following morning, Sir Kenelm's son posted 
to London bearing the recipes, with a pistol in the 
pocket of his great coat against the crossing of 
Hounslow Heath. He went to a printer at the Star 
in Little Britain whose name was H. Brome. 

Shortly the book appeared. It was the son who 
wrote the preface: "There needs no Rhetoricating 
Floscules to set it off. The Authour, as is well known, 
having been a Person of Eminency for his Learning, 
and of Exquisite Curiosity in his Researches, Even 
that Incomparable Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight, 
Fellow of the Royal Society and Chancellour to the 
Queen Mother, (Et omen in Nomine) His name does 
sufficiently Auspicate the Work." The sale of the 
book is not recorded. It is supposed that the Lady 
Middlesex, so many of whose recipes had been used, 
directed that her chair be carried to the shop where 




U PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

the book was for sale and that she bought largely of 
it. The Countess of Dorset bought a copy and 
spelled it out word for word to her cook. As for the 
Lady Monmouth, she bought not a single copy, which 
neglect on coming to the Digbys aroused a coolness. 

To this day it is likely that a last auspicated 
volume still sits on its shelf with the spice jars in 
some English country kitchen and that a worn and 
toothless cook still thumbs its leaves. If the guests 
about the table be of an antique mind, still will they 
pledge one another with its honeyed drinks, still will 
they pipe and whistle of its virtues, still will they — 

"EAT" — A flaring sign hangs above the sidewalk. 
By this time, in our noonday search for food, we have 
come into the thick of the restaurants. In the jungle 
of the city, here is the feeding place. Here come the 
growling bipeds for such bones and messes as are 
thrown them. 

The waiter thrusts a card beneath my nose. "Nice 
leg of lamb, sir?" I waved him off. "Hold a bit!" 
I cried. "You'll fetch me a capon in white broth as 
my Lady Monmouth broileth hers. Put plentiful 
sack in it and boil it until it simpreth!" The waiter 
scratched his head. "The chicken pie is good," he 
said. "It's our Wednesday dish." "Varlet!" I 
cried — then softened. "Let it be the chicken pie! 
But if the cook knoweth the manner that Lord 
Carlile does mix and pepper it, let that manner be 
followed to the smallest fraction of a pinch!" 




|Y SOME slim chance, reader, 
you may be the kind of person 
who, on a visit to a strange city, 
makes for a bookshop. Of course 
your shght temporal business 
may detain you in the earlier 
hours of the day. You sit with 
committees and stroke your pro- 
found chin, or you spend your talent in the market, 
or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. 
Or, if you be on a hohday, you strain yourself on the 
sights of the city, against being caught in an omis- 
sion. The bolder features of a cathedral must be 
grasped to satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame 
you later on your hearth, a building must be stuffed 
inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wear 
the pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these 
duties being done and the afternoon having not yet 
declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regale 
yourself? 

Doubtless, we have met. As you have scrunched 
against the shelf not to block the passage, but with 
your head thrown back to see the titles up above, you 
may have noticed at the corner of your eye — unless 



16 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

it was one of your blinder moments when you were 
fixed wholly on the shelf — a man in a slightly faded 
overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past 
the nimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its 
full commodity of hair. It was myself. I admit 
the portrait, though modesty has curbed me short of 
justice. 

Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella — 
which you held villainously beneath your arm — that 
took me in the ribs when you lighted on a set of 
Fuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but 
it was because I had myself lingered on the volumes 
but cooled at the price. How you smoothed and 
fingered them! With what triumph you bore them 
off! I bid you — for I see you in a sHppered state, 
eased and unbuttoned after dinner — I bid you turn 
the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest 
tang of their humor. You will of course go first, 
because of its broad fame, to the page on Shakespeare 
and Ben Jonson and their wet- combats at the Mer- 
maid. But before the night is too far gone and while 
yet you can hold yourself from nodding, you will 
please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia 
and his "strange performances, the scene whereof is 
laid at such a distance, they are cheaper credited than 
confuted." 

In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I 
admit a bookish quirk maybe, a love of the shelf, a 
weakness for morocco, especially if it is stained with 
age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS 17 

I'll go in "just to look about a bit, to see what the 
fellow has," and on an occasion I pick up a volume. 
But I am innocent of first editions. It is a stiff 
courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on 
this form of primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed 
my way with pleasure along aristocratic shelves and 
flipped out volumes here and there to ask their price, 
but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that 
engage me. If a rack of books is offered cheap 
before the door, with a fixed price upon a card, I 
come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I 
bow and sniff upon the rack, as though the past like 
an ancient fop in peruke and buckle were giving me 
the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in 
my nostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and 
intended observance toward the manners of a former 
century. 

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. 
It presents to the street no more than a decent front, 
but opens up behind like a swollen bottle. There are 
twenty rooms at least, piled together with such 
confusion of black passages and winding steps, that 
one might think that the owner himself must hold a 
thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, 
such are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, 
that, were the legend of the Minotaur but English, 
you might fancy that the creature still lived in this 
labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums — 
for the beast grows old — at some darker corner. 
There is a story of the place, that once a raw clerk 



18 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

having been sent to rummage in the basement, his 
candle tipped off the shelf. He was left in so com- 
plete darkness that his fears overcame his judgment 
and for two hours he roamed and babbled among the 
barrels. Nor was his absence discovered until the 
end of the day when, as was the custom, the clerks 
counted noses at the door. When they found him, 
he bolted up the steps, nor did he cease his whimper 
until he had reached the comforting twilight of the 
outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full 
two years and had a beard coming — so the story 
runs — before he would again venture beyond the 
third turning of the passage; to the stunting of his 
scholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther 
windings. 

Or it may appear credible that in ages past a 
jealous builder contrived the place. Having no 
learning himself and being at odds with those of 
better opportunity, he twisted the pattern of the 
house. Such was his evil temper, that he set the steps 
at a dangerous hazard in the dark, in order that 
scholars — whose eyes are bleared at best — ^might risk 
their legs to the end of time. Those of strict 
orthodoxy have even suspected the builder to have 
been an atheist, for they have observed what double 
joints and steps and turnings confuse the passage to 
the devouter books — the Early Fathers in particular 
being up a winding stair where even the soberest 
reader might break his neck. Be these things as they 
may, leather bindings in sets of "grenadier uni- 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS 19 

formity" ornament the upper and lighter rooms. 
Biography straggles down a hallway, with a candle 
needed at the farther end. A room of dingy plays — 
Wycherley, Congreve and their crew — looks out 
through an area grating. It was through even so 
foul an eye, that when alive, they looked upon the 
world. As for theology, except for the before- 
mentioned Fathers, it sits in general and dusty 
convention on the landing to the basement, its snuffy 
sermons, by a sad misplacement — or is there an 
ironical intention? — pointing the way to the eternal 
abyss below. 

It was in this shop that I inquired whether there 
was published a book on piracy in Cornwall. Now, 
I had lately come from Tintagel on the Cornish 
coast, and as I had climbed upon the rocks and looked 
down upon the sea, I had wondered to myself 
whether, if the knowledge were put out before me, 
I could compose a story of Spanish treasure and 
pirates. For I am a prey to such giddy ambition. 
A foul street — ^if the buildings slant and topple — 
will set me thinking delightfully of murders. A 
wharf-end with water lapping underneath and bits 
of rope about will set me itching for a deep-sea plot. 
Or if I go on broader range and see in my fancy a 
broken castle on a hill, I'll clear its moat and sound 
trumpets on its walls. If there is pepper in my mood, 
I'll storm its dungeon. Or in a softer moment I'll 
trim its unsubstantial towers with pageantry and rest 
upon my elbow until I fall asleep. So being cast 



20 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

upon the rugged Cornish coast whose cHffs are so 
swept with winter winds that the villages sit for 
comfort in the hollows, it was to be expected that 
my thoughts would run toward pirates. 

There is one rock especially which I had climbed 
in the rain and fog of early morning. A reckless 
path goes across its face with a sharp pitch to the 
ocean. It was so slippery and the wind so tugged 
and pulled to throw me oif, that although I endan- 
gered my dignity, I played the quadruped on the 
narrower parts. But once on top in the open blast 
of the storm and safe upon the level, I thumped with 
desire for a plot. In each inlet from the ocean I saw 
a pirate lugger — such is the pleasing word — ^with a 
keg of rum set up. Each cranny led to a cavern with 
doubloons piled inside. The very tempest in my ears 
was compounded out of ships at sea and wreck and 
pillage. I needed but a plot, a thread of action to 
string my villains on. If this were once contrived, I 
would spice my text with sailors' oaths and such 
boasting talk as might lie in my invention. Could I 
but come upon a plot, I might yet proclaim myself 
an author. 

With this guilty secret in me I blushed as I asked 
the question. It seemed sure that the shopkeeper 
must guess my purpose. I felt myself suspected as 
though I were a rascal buying pistols to commit a 
murder. Indeed, I seem to remember having read 
that even hardened criminals have become confused 
before a shopkeeper and betrayed themselves. Of 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS 21 

course, Dick Turpin and Jerry Abershaw could call 
for pistols in the same easy tone they ordered ale, but 
it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my 
innocence wanted nothing but the meager outline of 
a pirate's life, which I might fatten to my uses. 

But on a less occasion, when there is no plot 
thumping in me, I still feel a kind of embarrassment 
when I ask for a book out of the general demand. 
I feel so like an odd stick. This embarrassment 
applies not to the request for other commodities. 
I will order a collar that is quite outside the fashion, 
in a high-pitched voice so that the whole shop can 
hear. I could bargain for a purple waistcoat — did 
my taste run so — and though the sidewalk listened, 
it would not draw a blush. I have traded even for 
women's garments — though this did strain me — 
without an outward twitch. Finally, to top my 
valor, I have bought sheet music of the lighter kind 
and have pronounced the softest titles so that all 
could hear. But if I desire the poems of I^ovelace 
or the plays of Marlowe, I sidle close up to the shop- 
keeper to get his very ear. If the book is visible, I 
point my thumb at it without a word. 

It was but the other day — in order to fill a gap in 
a paper I was writing — I desired to know the name 
of an author who is obscure although his work has 
been translated into nearly all languages. I wanted 
to know a little about the life of the man who wrote 
Mary Had a Little Lamb, which, I am told, is known 
by children over pretty much all the western world. 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



It needed only a trip to the Public Library. Any 
attendant would direct me to the proper shelf. Yet 
once in the building, my courage oozed. My question, 
though serious, seemed too ridiculous to be asked. I 
would sizzle as I met the attendant's eye. Of a 
consequence, I fumbled on my own devices, possibly 
to the increase of my general knowledge, but without 
gaining what I sought. 

They had no book in the Bath shop on piracy in 
Cornwall. I was offered instead a work in two 
volumes on the notorious highwaymen of history, and 
for a moment my plot swerved in that direction. But 
I put it by. To pay the fellow for his pains — for he 
had dug in barrels to his shoulders and had a smudge 
across his nose — I bought a copy of Thomson's 
"Castle of Indolence," and in my more energetic 
moods I read it. And so I came away. 

On leaving the shop, lest I should be nipped in a 
neglect, I visited the Roman baths. Then I took the 
waters in the Assembly Room. It was Sam Weller, 
you may recall, who remarked, when he was enter- 
tained by the select footmen, that the waters tasted 
like warm flat-irons. Finally, I viewed the Crescent 
around which the shirted Winkle ran with the 
valorous Dowler breathing on his neck. With such 
distractions, as you may well imagine, Cornish 
pirates became as naught. Such mental vibration as 
I had was now gone toward a tale of fashion in the 
days when Queen Anne was still alive. Of a conse- 
quence, I again sought the bookshop and stifling my 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS ^3 

timidity, I demanded such volumes as might set me 
most agreeably to my task. 

I have in mind also a bookshop of small pretension 
in a town in Wales. For purely secular delight, 
maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodist 
sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a 
warmth to singe so poor a worm as I. Yet its sign- 
board popped its welcome when I had walked ten 
miles of sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather 
than the divinity that keeps the place in memory. 
The owner was absent on an errand, and his daughter, 
who had been clumping about the kitchen on my 
arrival, was uninstructed in the price marks. So I 
read and fanned myself until his return. 

Perhaps my sluggishness toward first editions — to 
which I have hinted above — comes in part from the 
acquaintance with a man who in a linguistic outburst 
as I met him, pronounced himself to be a numismatist 
and philatelist. One only of these names would have 
satisfied a man of less conceit. It is as though the 
pteranodon should claim also to be the spoon-bill 
dinosaur. It is against modesty that one man should 
summon all the letters. No, the numismatist's 
head is not crammed with the mysteries of life and 
death, nor is a philatelist one who is possessed with 
the dimmer secrets of eternity. Rather, this man 
who was so swelled with titles, eked a living by selling 
coins and stamps, and he was on his way to Europe 
to replenish his wares. Inside his waistcoat, just 
above his liver — if he owned so human an append- 



H PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

age — ^he carried a magnifying glass. With this, 
when the business fit was on him, he counted the 
lines and dots upon a stamp, the perforations on its 
edge. He catalogued its volutes, its stipples, the 
frisks and curlings of its pattern. He had numbered 
the very hairs on the head of George Washington, 
for in such minutiae did the value of the stamp reside. 
Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would 
invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance 
or accident — resting on a flaw — founded on a speck — 
cause no ferment of my desires. 

For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops 
where I most often prowl. There is in London a 
district around Charing Cross Road where almost 
every shop has books for sale. There is a continuous 
rack along the sidewalk, each title beckoning for your 
attention. You recall the class of street-readers of 
whom Charles Lamb wrote — "poor gentry, who, not 
having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a 
little learning at the open stalls." It was on some 
such street that these folk practiced their innocent 
larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence 
with which they read "Clarissa," they would continue 
her distressing adventures across the way. By a 
lingering progress up the street, "Sir Charles Grand- 
ison" might be nibbled down — by such as had the 
stomach — without the outlay of a single penny. As 
for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a 
whole perusal would outlast the summer and stretch 
to the colder months, yet with patience they could be 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS 



S5 



got through. However, before the end was 
even a hasty reader whose eye was nimble on the 
would be blowing on his nails and pulling his 
tails between him and the November wind. 

But the habit of reading at the 
open stalls was not only with the 
poor. You will remember 
that Mr. Brownlow was ad- 
dicted. Really, had not the 
Artful Dodger stolen his 
pocket handkerchief as he 
was thus engaged upon 
his book, the whole 
history of Oliver 
Twist must have been 
quite different. And 
Pepys himself, Samuel 
Pepys, F. R. S., was 
guilty. "To Paul's 
ChurchYard,"he 
writes, "and there looked 
upon the second part of 
Hudibras, which I buy 
not, but borrow to 
read." Such parsimony 
is the curse of authors. 
To thumb a volume 
cheaply around a neighbor 
hood is what keeps them 
their garrets. It is a less offence 



come, 
page, 
coat- 




^6 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

to steal peanuts from a stand. Also, it is recorded 
in the life of Beau Nash that the persons of fashion of 
his time, to pass a tedious morning "did divert them- 
selves with reading in the booksellers' shops." We 
may conceive Mr. Fanciful Fopling in the sleepy 
blink of those early hours before the pleasures of the 
day have made a start, inquiring between his yawns 
what latest novels have come down from London, or 
whether a new part of "Pamela" is offered yet. If the 
post be in, he will prop himself against the shelf and— 
unless he glaze and nod — he will read cheaply for an 
hour. Or my Lady Betty, having taken the waters 
in the pump-room and lent her ear to such gossip as 
is abroad so early, is now handed to her chair and goes 
round by Gregory's to read a bit. She is flounced 
to the width of the passage. Indeed, until the fashion 
shall abate, those more solid authors that are set up 
in the rear of the shop, must remain during her visits 
in general neglect. Though she hold herself against 
the shelf and tilt her hoops, it would not be possible 
to pass. She is absorbed in a book of the softer sort, 
and she flips its pages against her lap-dog's nose. 

But now behold the student coming up the street! 
He is clad in shining black. He is thin of shank as 
becomes a scholar. He sags with knowledge. He 
hungers after wisdom. He comes opposite the book- 
shop. It is but coquetry that his eyes seek the 
window of the tobacconist. His heart, you may be 
sure, looks through the buttons at his back. At last 
he turns. He pauses on the curb. Now desire has 



ON BUYING OLD BOOKS 



27 



clutched him. He jiggles his trousered shillings. 
He treads the gutter. He squints upon the rack. 
He lights upon a treasure. He plucks it forth. He 
is unresolved whether to buy it or 
to spend the extra shilling on his 
dinner. Now all you cooks to- 
gether, to save your business, rattle 
your pans to rouse him ! If within 
>\ these ancient buildings there are 
;<// onions ready peeled — quick ! — 
throw them in the skillet that the 
whiff may come beneath his nose! 
Chance trembles and casts its 
vote — eenie meenie — down goes the 
shilling — he has bought the book. 
Tonight he will spread it beneath 
his candle. Feet may beat a snare 
of pleasure on the pavement, glad 
cries may pipe across the dark- 
ness, a fiddle may scratch its invi- 
tation — all the rumbling notes 
of midnight traffic will tap in 
vain their summons upon his 
window. 








DEADER. POSSIBLY on one 
of your country walks you have 
come upon a man with his back 
against a hedge, tormented bj?- a 
fiend in the likeness of a dog. You 
yourself, of course, are not a 
coward. You possess that cornerstone of virtue, a 
love for animals. If at your heels a dog sniffs and 
growls, you humor his mistake, you flick him off and 
proceed with unbroken serenity. It is scarcely an 
interlude to your speculation on the market. Or if 
you work upon a sonnet and are in the vein, your 
thoughts, despite the beast, run unbroken to a rhyme. 
But pity this other whose heart is less stoutly 
wrapped! He has gone forth on a holiday to take 
the country air, to thrust himself into the freer wind, 
to poke with his stick for such signs of Spring as may 
be hiding in the winter's leaves. Having been 
grinding in an office he flings himself on the great 
round world. He has come out to smell the earth. 
Or maybe he seeks a hilltop for a view of the fields 
that lie below patched in many colors, as though 
nature had been sewing at her garments and had 
mended the cloth from her bag of scraps. 



ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 29 

On such a journey this fellow is travelling when, 
at a turn of the road, he hears the sound of barking. 
As yet there is no dog in sight. He pauses. He 
listens. How shall one know whether the sound 
comes up a wrathful gullet or whether the dog bays 
at him impersonally, as at the distant moon? Or 
maybe he vents himself upon a stubborn cow. Surely 
it is not an idle tune he practices. He holds a victim 
in his mind. There is sour venom on his churlish 
tooth. Is it best to go roundabout, or forward with 
such a nice compound of innocence, boldness and 
modesty as shall satisfy the beast? If one engross 
oneself on something that lies to the lee of danger, 
it allays suspicion. Or if one absorb oneself upon the 
flora — a primrose on the river's brim — it shows him 
clear and stainless. The stupidest dog should see 
that so close a student can have no evil in him. 
Perhaps it would be better to throw away one's stick 
lest it make a show of violence. Or it may be con- 
cealed along the outer leg. Ministers of Grace 
defend us, what an excitement in the barnyard ! Has 
virtue no reward? Shall innocence perish off the 
earth? Not one dog, but many, come running out. 
There has gone a rumor about the barn that there 
is a stranger to be eaten, and it's likely — if they keep 
their clamor — there will be a bone for each. Note 
how the valor oozes from the man of peace ! Observe 
his sidling gait, his skirts pulled close, his hollowed 
back, his head bent across his shoulder, his startled 
eye ! Watch him mince his steps, lest a lingering heel 



30 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

be nipped! Listen to him try the foremost dog with 
names, to gull him to a belief that they have met 
before in happier circumstances ! He appeals mutely 
to the farmhouse that a recall be sounded. The 
windows are tightly curtained. The heavens are 
comfortless. 

You remember the fellow in the play who would 
have loved war had they not digged villainous salt- 
petre from the harmless earth. The countryside, too, 
in my opinion, would be more peaceful of a summer 
afternoon were it not overrun with dogs. Let me 
be plain! I myself like dogs — sleepy dogs blinking 
in the firelight, friendly dogs with wagging tails, 
young dogs in their first puppyhood with their teeth 
scarce sprouted, whose jaws have not yet burgeoned 
into danger, and old dogs, too, who sun themselves 
and give forth hollow, toothless, reassuring sounds. 
When a dog assumes the cozy habits of the cat without 
laying off his nobler nature, he is my friend. A dog 
of vegetarian aspect pleases me. Let him bear a 
mild eye as though he were nourished on the softer 
foods! I would wish every dog to have a full com- 
plement of tail. It's the sure barometer of his warm 
regard. There's no art to find his mind's construction 
in the face. And I would have him with not too much 
curiosity. It's a quality that brings him too often to 
the gate. It makes him prone to sniff when one sits 
upon a visit. Nor do I like dogs addicted to sudden 
excitement. Lethargy becomes them better. Let 
them be without the Gallic graces ! In general, I like 



ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 31 

a dog to whom I have been properly introduced, with 
an exchange of credentials. While the dog is by, let 
his master take my hand and address me in softest 
tones, to cement the understanding! At bench-shows 
I love the beasts, although I keep to the middle of 
the aisle. The streets are all the safer when so many 
of the creatures are kept within. 

Frankly, I would enjoy the country more, if I 
knew that all the dogs were away on visits. Of 
course, the highroad is quite safe. Its frequent traffic 
is its insurance. Then, too, the barns are at such a 
distance, it is only a monstrous anger can bring the 
dog. But if you are in need of direction you select 
a friendly white house with green shutters. You 
swing open the gate and crunch across the pebbles 
to the door. To the nearer eye there is a look of 
"dog" about the place. Or maybe you are hot and 
thirsty, and there is a well at the side of the house. 
Is it better to gird yourself to danger or to put off 
your thirst until the crossroads where pop is sold? 

Or a lane leads down to the river. Even at this 
distance you hear the shallow brawl of water on the 
stones. A path goes off across a hill, with trees 
beckoning at the top. There is a wind above and 
a wider sweep of clouds. Surely, from the crest of 
the hill the whole county will lie before you. Such 
tunes as come up from the world below — a school- 
bell, a rooster crowing, children laughing on the road, 
a threshing machine on the lower meadows — such 
tunes are pitched to a marvellous softness. Shall we 



32^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

follow the hot pavement, or shall we dare those lonely- 
stretches ? 

There is a kind of person who is steeped too much 
in valor. He will cross a field although there is a dog 
inside the fence. Goodness knows that I would 
rather keep to the highroad with such humility as 
shall not rouse the creature. Or he will shout and 
whistle tunes that stir the dogs for miles. He slashes 
his stick against the weeds as though in challenge. 
One might think that he went about on unfeeling 
stalks instead of legs as children walk on stilts, or 
that a former accident had clipped him off above the 
knees and that he was now jointed out of wood to a 
point beyond the biting limit. Or perhaps the clothes 
he wears beneath — the inner mesh and very balbrig- 
gan of his attire — is of so hard a texture that it turns 
a tooth. Be these defenses as they may, note with 
what bravado he mounts the wall! One leg dangles 
as though it were baited and were angling for a bite. 

There is a French village near Quebec whose 
population is chiefly dogs. It lies along the river in 
a single street, not many miles from the point where 
Wolfe climbed to the Plains of Abraham. There are 
a hundred houses flat against the roadway and on 
the steps of each there sits a dog. As I went through 
on foot, each of these dogs picked me up, examined 
me nasally and passed me on, not generously as 
though I had stood the test, but rather in deep sus- 
picion that I was a queer fellow, not to be penetrated 
at first, but one who would surely be found out and 



ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 33 

gobbled before coming to the end of the street. As 
long as I would eventually furnish forth the common 
banquet, it mattered not which dog took the first nip. 
Inasmuch as I would at last be garnished for the 
general tooth, it would be better to wait until all were 
gathered around the platter. "Good neighbor dog," 
each seemed to say, "you too sniif upon the rogue! 
If he be honest, my old nose is much at fault." 
Meantime I padded lightly through the village, at 
first calling on the dogs by English names, but later 
using such wisps as I had of French. "Aucassin, 
mon pauvre chien. Voici, Tintagiles, alors done mon 
cherie. Je suis votre ami," but with little effect. 

But the dogs that one meets in the Canadian woods 
are of the fiercest breed. They border on the wolf. 
They are called huskies and they are so strong and so 
fleet of foot that they pull sleds for hours across the 
frozen lakes at almost the speed of a running horse. 
It must be confessed that they are handsome and if it 
happens to be your potato peelings and discarded fish 
that they eat, they warm into friendliness. Indeed, on 
these occasions, one can make quite a show of bravery 
by stroking and dealing lightly with them. But once 
upon a time in an ignorant moment two other campers 
and myself followed a lonely railroad track and 
struck off on a path through the pines in search of 
a certain trapper on a fur farm. The path went on 
a broken zigzag avoiding fallen trees and soft hollows, 
conducting itself on the whole with more patience 
than firmness. We walked a quarter of a mile, but 



34^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

still we saw no cabin. The line of the railroad had 
long since disappeared. An eagle wheeled above us 
and quarrelled at our intrusion. Presently to test our 
course and learn whether we were coming near the 
cabin, we gave a shout. Immediately out of the 
deeper woods there came a clamor that froze us. 
Such sounds, it seemed, could issue only from bloody 
and dripping jaws. In a panic, as by a common 
impulse we turned and ran. Yet we did not run 
frankly as when the circus lion is loose, but in a shame- 
faced manner — an attempt at a retreat in good 
order — something between a walk and a run. At the 
end of a hundred yards we stopped. No dogs had 
fallen on us. Danger had not burst its kennel. We 
hallooed again, to rouse the trapper. At last, after 
a minute of suspense, came his answering voice, the 
sweetest sound to be imagined. Whereupon I came 
down from my high stump which I had climbed for 
a longer view. 

I am convinced that I am not alone in my — shall 
I say diffidence? — toward dogs. Indeed, there is 
evidence from the oldest times that mankind, in its 
more honest moments, has confessed to a fear of dogs. 
In recognition of this general fear, the unmuzzled 
Cerberus was put at the gate of Hades. It was 
rightly felt that when the unhappy pilgrims got 
within, his fifty snapping heads were better than 
a bolt upon the door. It was better for them to 
endure the ills they had, than be nipped in the upper 
passage. He, also, who first spoke the ancient 



ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 35 

proverb, Let sleeping dogs lie, did no more than voice 
the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented 
the saying that the world is going to the bow-wows, 
lodged his deplorable pessimism in fitting words. 

It was Daniel who sat with the lions. But there 
are degrees of bravery. On Long Street, within 
sight of my window — just where the street gets into 
its most tangled traffic — there has hung for many 
years the painted signboard of a veterinary surgeon. 
Its artist was in the first flourish of youth. Old age 
had not yet chilled him when he mixed his gaudy 
colors. The surgeon's name is set up in modest 
letters, but the horse below flames with color. What 
a flaring nostril! What an eager eye! How arched 
the neck! Here is a wrath and speed unknown to the 
quadrupeds of this present Long Street. Such mild- 
eyed, accumbent, sharp-ribbed horses as now infest 
the curb — ^mere whittlings from a larger age — hang 
their heads at their degeneracy. Indeed, these horses 
seem to their owners not to be worth the price of a 
nostrum. If disease settles in them, let them lean 
against a post until the fit is past! And of a conse- 
quence, the doctor's work has fallen off. It has 
become a rare occasion when it is permitted him to 
stroke his chin in contemplation of some inner palsy. 
Therefore to give his wisdom scope, the doctor some 
time since announced the cellar of the building to be 
a hospital for dogs. Must I press the analogy? I 
have seen the doctor with bowl and spoon in hand 
take leave of the cheerful world. He opens the cellar 



36 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

door. A curdling yelp comes up the stairs. In the 
abyss below there are twenty dogs at least, all of 
them sick, all dangerous. Not since Orion led his 
hunting pack across the heavens has there been so 
fierce a sound. The door closes. There is a final yelp, 
such as greets a bone. Doubtless, by this time, they 
are munching on the doctor. Good sir, had you lived 
in pre-apostolic days, your name would have been 
lined with Daniel's in the hymn. I might have spent 
my earliest treble in your praise. 

But there are other kinds of dogs. Gentlest of 
readers, have you ever passed a few days at Tun- 
bridge Wells? It lies on one of the roads that run 
from London to the Channel and for several hundred 
years persons have gone there to take the waters 
against the more fashionable ailments. Its chief 
fame was in the days when rich folk, to ward off for 
the season a touch of ancestral gout, travelled down 
from London in their coaches. We may fancy Lord 
Thingumdo crossing his sleek legs inside or putting 
his head to the window on the change of horses. He 
has outriders and a horn to sound his coming. His 
Lordship has a liver that must be mended, but also he 
has a weakness for the gaming table. Or Lady 
Euphemia, wrapped in silks, languishes mornings in 
her lodgings with a latest novel, but goes forth at 
noon upon the Pantilles to shop in the stalls. A box 
of patches must be bought. A lace flounce has caught 
her eye. Bless her dear eyes, as she bends upon her 
purchase she is fair to look upon. The Grand Rout 



ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 37 

is set for tonight. Who knows but that the Duke will 
put the tender question and will ask her to name the 
happy day? 

But these golden days are past. Tunbridge Wells 
has sunk from fashion. The gaming tables are gone. 
A band still plays mornings in the Pantilles — or did 
so before the war — but cheaper gauds are offered in 
the shops. Emerald brooches are fallen to paste. In 
all the season there is scarcely a single demand for 
a diamond garter. If there were now a Rout, the 
only dancers would be stiff shadows from the past. 
The healing waters still trickle from the ground and 
an old woman serves you for a penny, but the miracle 
has gone. The old world is cured and dead. 

Tunbridge Wells is visited now chiefly by old 
ladies whose husbands — to judge by the black lace 
caps — ^have left Lombard Street for heaven. At the 
hotel where I stopped, which was at the top of the 
Commons outside the thicker town, I was the only 
man in the breakfast room. Two widows, each with 
a tiny dog on a chair beside her, sat at the next table. 
This was their conversation: 

"Did you hear her last night?" 

"Was it Flossie that I heard?" 

"Yes. The poor dear was awake all night. She 
got her feet wet yesterday when I let her run upon 
the grass." 

But after breakfast — ^if the day is sunny and the 
wind sits in a favoring quarter — one by one the 



PIPPINS AND CHEESE 



widows go forth in their chairs. These are wicker 
contrivances that hang between three wheels. Burros 
pull them, and men walk alongside to hold their 
bridles. Down comes the widow. Down comes a 
maid with her wraps. Down comes a maid with 
Flossie. The wraps are adjusted. The widow 
is handed in. Her feet are wound around 
with comforters against a draft. Her salts 
rest in her lap. Her ample bag of knitting 
is safe aboard. Flossie is placed beside her. 
Proot! The donkey starts. 

All morning the widow sits in 
the Pantilles and listens to the band 
and knits. Flossie sits on the flag- 
ging at her feet with an intent eye 
upon the ball of worsted. 
Twice in a morning — three 
times if the gods are kind — 
the ball rolls to the pavement. 
Flossie has been waiting 
so long for this to hap- 
pen. It is the bright 
moment of her life — the 
point and peak of hap- /^ 
piness. She darts upon ^'^ 
it. She paws it exult- 
antly for a moment. 
Brief is the rainbow and 
brief the Borealis. The 
finger of Time is swift. 




ANY STICK WILL DO TO BEAT A DOG 39 

The poppy blooms and fades. The maid captures the 
ball of worsted and restores it. 

It lies in the widow's lap. The band plays. The 
needles click to a long tune. The healing waters 
trickle from the ground. The old woman whines 
their merits. Flossie sits motionless, her head cocked 
and her eye upon the ball. Perhaps the god of 
puppies will again be good to her. 




abs Op Nornins 



Y GRANDFATHER'S 

farm lay somewhere this 
side of the sunset, so near 
that its pastures barely 
missed the splash of color. 
But from the city it was a two hours' journey by 
horse and phaeton. My grandfather drove. I sat 
next, my feet swinging clear of the lunchbox. M}^ 
brother had the outside, a place denied to me for fear 
that I might fall across the wheel. When we were al] 
set, my mother made a last dab at my nose — an 
unheeded smudge having escaped my vigilance. 
Then my grandfather said, "Get up," — twice, for the 
lazy horse chose to regard the first summons as a jest. 
We start. The great wheels turn. My brother leans 
across the guard to view the miracle. We crunch the 
gravel. We are alive for excitement. My brother 
plays we are a steamboat and toots. I toot in 
imitation, but higher up as if I were a younger sort 
of steamboat. We hold our hands on an imaginary 
wheel and steer. We scorn grocery carts and all such 
harbor craft. We are on a long cruise. Street 
lights will guide us sailing home. 

Of course there were farms to the south of the city 
and apples may have ripened there to as fine a flavor, 
and to the east, also, doubtless there were farms. It 



ROADS OF MORNING 4,1 

would be asking too much that the west should have 
all the haystacks, cherry trees and cheese houses. If 
your judgment skimmed upon the surface, you would 
even have found the advantage with the south. It 
was prettier because more rolling. It was shaggier. 
The country to the south tipped up to the hills, so 
sharply in places that it might have made its living 
by collecting nickels for the slide. Indeed, one might 
think that a part of the city had come bouncing down 
the slope, for now it lay resting at the bottom, 
sprawled somewhat for its ease. Or it might 
appear — ^if your belief runs on discarded lines — 
that the whole flat-bottomed earth had been fouled in 
its celestial course and now lay aslant upon its beam 
with its cargo shifted and spilled about. 

The city streets that led to the south, which in those 
days ended in lanes, popped out of sight abruptly at 
the top of the first ridge. And when the earth caught 
up again with their level, already it was dim and 
purple and tall trees were no more than a roughened 
hedge. But what lay beyond that range of hills — 
what towns and cities — ^what oceans and forests — 
how beset with adventure — ^how fearful after dark — 
these things you could not see, even if you climbed 
to some high place and strained yourself on tiptoe. 
And if you walked from breakfast to lunch — until 
you gnawed within and were but a hollow drum — 
there would still be a higher range against the sky. 
There are misty kingdoms on this whirling earth, but 
the ways are long and steep. 



42 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

The lake lay to the north with no land beyond, the 
city to the east. But to the west — 

Several miles outside the city as it then was, and 
still beyond its clutches, the country was cut by a 
winding river bottom with sharp edges of shale. 
Down this valley Rocky River came brawling in the 
spring, over-fed and quarrelsome. Later in the 
year — ^its youthful appetite having caught an indi- 
gestion — it shrunk and wasted to a shadow. By 
August you could cross it on the stones. The uproar 
of its former flood was marked upon the shale and 
trunks of trees here and there were wedged, but now 
the river plays drowsy tunes upon the stones. There 
is scarcely enough movement of water to flick the 
sunlight. A leaf on its idle current is a lazy craft 
whose skipper nods. There were hickory trees on the 
point above. May-apples grew in the deep woods, 
and blackberries along the fences. And in the season 
sober horses plowed up and down the fields with 
nodding heads, affirming their belief in the goodness 
of the soil and their willingness to help in its fruition. 

Yet the very core of this valley in days past was 
a certain depth of water at a turn of the stream. 
There was a clay bank above it and on it small naked 
boys stood and daubed themselves. One of them put 
a band of clay about himself by way of decoration. 
Another, by a more general smudge, made himself a 
Hottentot and thereby gave his manners a wider 
scope and license. But by daubing yourself entire 
you became an Indian and might vent yourself in 



ROADS OF MORNING ^3 

hideous yells, for it was amazing how the lungs grew 
stouter when the clay was laid on thick. Then you 
tapped your flattened palm rapidly against your 
mouth and released an intermittent uproar in order 
that the valley might be warned of the deviltry to 
come. You circled round and round and beat upon 
the ground in the likeness of a war dance. But at 
last, sated with scalps, off you dived into the pool and 
came up a white man. Finally, you stood on one leg 
and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled a 
bloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your 
life — for this tiny creature of the rocks was credited 
with the gift of prodigious inflation, and might inhale 
you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to his 
ugly purpose. 

Farms should not be too precisely located ; at least 
this is true of farms which, like my grandfather's, 
hang in a mist of memory. I read once of a wonderful 
spot — quite inferior, doubtless, to my grandfather's 
farm — ^which was located by evil directions inten- 
tionally to throw a seeker off. Munchausen, you will 
recall, in the placing of his magic countries, was not 
above this agreeable villainy. Robinson Crusoe was 
loose and vague in the placing of his island. It is 
said that Izaak Walton waved a hand obscurely 
toward the stream where he had made a catch, but 
could not be cornered to a nice direction, lest his pool 
be overrun. In early youth, I myself went, on a 
mischievous hint, to explore a remote region which I 
was told lay in the dark behind the kindling pile. 



l^lp PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

But because I moved in a fearful darkness, quite 
beyond the pale light from the furnace room, I lost 
the path. It did not lead me to the peaks and the 
roaring waters. 

But the farm was reached by more open methods. 
Dolly and the phaeton were the chief instruments. 
First — if you were so sunk in ignorance as not to know 
the road — you inquired of everybody for the chewing 
gum factory, to be known by its smell of peppermint. 
Then you sought the high bridge over the railroad 
tracks. Beyond was Kamm's Corners. Here, at a 
turn of the road, was a general store whose shelves 
sampled the produce of this whole fair world and the 
factories thereof. One might have thought that the 
proprietor emulated Noah at the flood by bidding 
two of each created things to find a place inside. 

Beyond Kamm's Corners you came to the great 
valley. When almost down the hill you passed a 
house with broken windows and unkept grass. This 
house, by report, was haunted, but you could laugh 
at such tales while the morning sun was up. At the 
bottom of the hill a bridge crossed the river, with 
loose planking that rattled as though the man who 
made nails was dead. 

Beyond the bridge, at the first rise of ground, the 
horse stopped — for I assume that you drove a 
sagacious animal — ^by way of hint that every one of 
sound limb get out and walk to the top of the hill. 
A suspicious horse turned his head now and again and 



ROADS OF MORNING ^5 

cast his eye upon the buggy to be sure that no one 
climbed in again. 

Presently you came to the toll-gate at the top and 
paid its keeper five cents, or whatever large sum he 
demanded. Then your grandfather — if by fortunate 
chance you happened to have one — asked after his 
wife and children, and had they missed the croup; 
then told him his corn was looking well. 

My grandfather — for it is time you knew him — 
lived with us. Because of a railway accident fifteen 
years before in which one of his legs was cut off just 
below the knee, he had retired from public office. 
Several years of broken health had been followed by 
years that were for the most part free from suffering. 
My own first recollection reverts to these better years. 
I recall a tall man — ^to my eyes a giant, for he was 
taller even than my father — ^who came into the 
nursery as I was being undressed. There was a wind 
in the chimney, and the windows rattled. He put 
his crutches against the wall. Then taking me in his 
arms, he swung me aloft to his shoulder by a series 
of somersaults. I cried this first time, but later I 
came to demand the performance. 

Once, when I was a little older, I came upon one 
of his discarded wooden legs as I was playing in the 
garret of the house. It was my first acquaintance 
with such a contrivance. It lay behind a pile of 
trunks and I was, at the time, on my way to the 
center of the earth, for the cheerful path dove into 
darkness behind the chimney. You may imagine my 



j£ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

surprise. I approached it cautiously. I viewed it 
from all sides by such dusty light as fell between the 
trunks. Not without fear I touched it. It was 
unmistakably a leg — but whose? Was it possible 
that there was a kind of Bluebeard in the family, who, 
for his pleasure, lopped off legs? There had been 
no breath of such a scandal. Yet, if my reading and 
studies were correct, such things had happened in 
other families not very different from ours; not in 
our own town maybe, but in such near-by places as 
Kandahar and Serendib — places which in my warm 
regard were but as suburbs to our street, to be gained 
if you persevered for a hundred lamp-posts. Or 
could the leg belong to Annie the cook? Her nimble- 
ness with griddle-cakes belied the thought: And 
once, when the wind had swished her skirts, manifestly 
she was whole and sound. Then all at once I knew 
it to be my grandfather's. Grown familiar, I pulled 
it to the window. I tried it on, but made bad work 
of walking. 

To the eye my grandfather had two legs all the 
way down and, except for his crutches and an occa- 
sional squeak, you would not have detected his 
infirmity. Evidently the maker did no more than 
imitate nature, although, for .myself, I used to wonder 
at the poverty of his invention. There would be 
distinction in a leg, which in addition to its usual 
functions, would also bend forward at the knee, or 
had a surprising sidewise joint — and there would be 
profit, too, if one cared to make a show of it. The 



ROADS OF MORNING 47 

greatest niggard on the street would pay two pins 
for such a sight. 

As my grandfather was the only old gentleman of 
my acquaintance, a wooden leg seemed the natural 
and suitable accompaniment of old age. Persons, it 
appeared, in their riper years, cast off a leg, as trees 
dropped their leaves. But my grandmother puzzled 
me. Undeniably she retained both of hers, yet her 
hair was just as white, and she was almost as old. 
Evidently this law of nature worked only with men. 
Ladies, it seemed, were not deciduous. But how the 
amputation was effected in men — ^whether by day or 
night — how the choice fell between the right and 
left — whether the wooden leg came down the chimney 
(a proper entrance) — ^how soon my father would go 
the way of all masculine flesh and cast his off — these 
matters I could not solve. The Arabian Nights were 
silent on the subject. Aladdin's uncle, apparently, 
had both his legs. He was too brisk in villainy to 
admit a wooden leg. But then, he was only an uncle. 
If his history ran out to the end, doubtless he would 
go with a limp in his riper days. The story of the 
Bible — although it trafficked in such veterans as 
Methuselah — gave not a hint. Abraham died full of 
years. Here would have been a proper test — but the 
book was silent. 

My grandfather in those days had much leisure 
time. He still kept an office at the rear of the house, 
although he had given up the regular practice of the 
law. But a few old clients lingered on, chiefly women 



Ji.8 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

who carried children in their arms and old men 
without neckties who came to him for free advice. 
These he guided patiently in their troubles, and he 
would sit an hour to listen to a piteous story. In an 
extremity he gave them money, or took a well-meant 
but worthless note. Often his callers overran the 
dinner hour and my mother would have to jingle the 
dinner bell at the door to rouse them. Occasionally 
he would be called on for a public speech, and for 
several days he would be busy at his desk. Frequently 
he presided at dinners and would tell a story and sing 
a song, for he had a fine bass voice and was famous 
for his singing. 

He read much in those last years in science. When 
he was not reading Trowbridge to his grandchildren, 
it was Huxley to himself. But when his eyes grew 
tired, he would on an occasion — if there was canning 
in the house — go into the kitchen where my mother 
and grandmother worked, and help pare the fruit. 
Seriously, as though he were engaged upon a game, 
he would cut the skin into thinnest strips, unbroken 
to the end, and would hold up the coil for us to see. 
Or if he broke it in the cutting it was a point against 
him in the contest. 

His diversion rather than his profit was the care 
and rental of about twenty small houses, some of 
which he built to fit his pensioners. My brother and 
myself often made the rounds with him in the phaeton. 
At most of the houses he was affectionately greeted 
as "Jedge" and was held in long conversations across 



ROADS OF MORNING J^9 

the fence. And to see an Irishman was to see a 
friend. They all knew him and said, "Good mornin'," 
as we passed. He and they were good Democrats 
together. 

I can see in memory a certain old Irishman in a 
red flannel shirt, with his foot upon the hub, bending 
across the wheel and gesticulating in an endless 
discussion of politics or crops, while my brother and 
I were impatient to be oif. Dolly was of course 
patient, for she had long since passed her fretful 
youth. If by any biological chance it had happened 
that she had been an old lady instead of a horse, she 
would have been the kind that spent her day in a 
rocker with her knitting. Any one who gave Dolly 
an excuse for standing was her friend. There she 
stood as though she wished the colloquy to last 
forever. 

It was seldom that Dolly lost her restraint. She 
would, indeed, when she came near the stable, some- 
what hasten her stride; and when we came on our 
drives to the turning point and at last headed about 
for home, Dolly would know it and show her knowl- 
edge by a quickening of the ears and the quiver of a 
-faint excitement. Yet Dolly lost her patience when 
there were flies. Then she threw off all repression 
and so waved her tail that she regularly got it across 
the reins. This stirred my grandfather to something 
not far short of anger. How vigorously would he try 
to dislodge the reins by pulling and jerking! Dolly 
only clamped down her tail the harder. Experience 



50 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

showed that the only way was to go slowlj^^ and 
craftily and without heat or temper — a slackening of 
the reins — a distraction of Dolly's attention — a 
leaning across the dashboard — a firm grasping of the 
tail out near the end — a sudden raising thereof. Ah ! 
It was done. We all settled back against the cushions. 
Or perhaps a friendly fly would come to our assist- 
ance and Dolly would have to use her tail in another 
direction. 

The whip was seldom used. Generally it stood in 
its socket. It was ornamental like a flagstaff. It 
forgot its sterner functions. But Dolly must have 
known the whip in some former life, for even a 
gesture toward the socket roused her. If it was 
rattled she mended her pace for a block. But if on 
a rare occasion my grandfather took it in his hand, 
Dolly lay one ear back in our direction, for she knew 
then he meant business. And what an excitement 
would arise in the phaeton! We held on tight for 
fear that she might take it into her mild old head to 
run away. 

But Dolly had her moments. One sunny summer 
afternoon while she grazed peacefully in the orchard, 
with her reins wound around the whip handle — ^the 
appropriate place on these occasions — she was evi- 
dently stung by a bee. My brother was at the time 
regaling himself in a near-by blackberry thicket. He 
looked up at an unusual sound. Without warning, 
Dolly had leaped to action and was tearing around 
the orchard dragging the phaeton behind her. She 



ROADS OF MORNING 51 

wrecked the top on a low hanging branch, then hit 
another tree, severing thereby all connection between 
herself and the phaeton, and at last galloped down 
the lane to the farm house, with the broken shafts 
and harness dangling behind her. Kipling's dun 
"with the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and 
the head of the gallows-tree," could hardly have 
shown more spirit. It was as though one brief minute 
of a glorious youth had come back to her. It was a 
last spurting of an old flame before it sunk to ash. 

My grandfather gave his leisure to his grand- 
children. He carved for us with his knife, with an 
especial knack for willow whistles. He showed us 
the colors that lay upon the world when we looked 
at it through one of the glass pendants of the parlor 
chandelier. He sat by us when we played duck-on- 
the-rock. He helped us with our kites and gave a 
superintendence to our toys. It is true that he was 
superficial with tin-tags and did not know the differ- 
ence in value between a Steam Engine tag — the 
rarest of them all — and a common Climax, but we 
forgave him as one forgives a friend who is ignorant 
of Persian pottery. He employed us as gardeners 
and put a bounty on weeds. We watered the lawn 
together, turn by turn. When I was no more than 
four years old, he taught us to play casino with 
him — and afterwards bezique. How he cried out if 
he got a royal sequence! With what excitement he 
announced a double bezique ! Or if one of us seemed 
about to score and lacked but a single card, how 



52 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

intently he contended for the last few tricks to 
thwart our declaration! And if we got it despite his 
lead of aces, how gravely he squinted on the cards 
against deception, with his glasses forward on his 
nose! 

When he took his afternoon nap and lay upon his 
back on the sofa in the sitting-room, we made paper 
pin-wheels to see whether his breath would stir them. 
This trick having come to his notice by a sudden 
awakening, he sometimes thereafter played to be 
asleep and snored in such a mighty gust that the 
wheels spun. He was like a Dutch tempest against 
a windmill. 

If a Dime Museum came to town we made an 
afternoon of it. He took us to all the circuses and 
gave us our choice of side-shows. We walked up and 
down before the stretches of painted canvas, bal- 
ancing in our desire a sword-swallower against an 
Indian Princess. Most of the fat women and all the 
dwarfs that I have known came to my acquaintance 
when in company with my grandfather. As a young 
man, it was said, he once ran away from home to join 
a circus as an acrobat, having acquired the trick of 
leaping upon a running horse. I fancy that his 
knack of throwing us to his shoulder by a double 
somersault was a recollection of his early days. You 
may imagine with what awe we looked on him even 
though he now went on crutches. He was the 
epitome of adventure, the very salt of excitement. 
It was better having him than a pirate in the house. 



ROADS OF MORNING 53 

When the circus had gone and life was drab, he was 
our tutor in the art of turning cart-wheels and making 
hand-stands against the door. 

And once, when we were away from him, he walked 
all morning about the garden and in his loneliness he 
gathered into piles the pebbles that we had dropped. 

I was too young to know my grandfather in his 
active days when he was prominent in public matters. 
His broader abilities are known to others. But 
though more than twenty years have passed since his 
death, I remember his tone of voice, his walk, his way 
of handling a crutch, all his tricks of speech and 
conduct as though he had just left the room. And 
I can think of nothing more beautiful than that a 
useful man who has faced the world for seventy years 
and has done his part, should come back in his old 
age to the nursery and be the playfellow of his 
grandchildren. 

But the best holiday was a trip to the farm. 

This farm — to which in our slow trot we have been 
so long a time in coming — lay for a mile on the upper 
land, and its grain fields and pastures looked down 
into the valley. The buildings, however, were set 
close to the road and fixed their interest on such 
occasional wagons as creaked by. A Switzer occupied 
the farm, who owned, in addition to the more imme- 
diate members of his family, a cuckoo clock whose 
weights hung on long cords which by Saturday night 
reached almost to the floor. When I have sat at his 
table, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, 



5^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

when the hour came near, in order not to miss the 
cuckoo's popping out. And in the duller spaces, 
when the door was shut, I have fancied it sitting in 
the dark and counting the minutes to itself. 

The Switzer's specialty was the making of a kind 
of rubber cheese which one could learn to like in time. 
Of the processes of its composition, I can remember 
nothing except that when it was in the great press 
the whey ran from its sides, but this may be common 
to all cheeses. I was once given a cup of this whey 
to drink and I brightened, for until it was in my 
mouth, I thought it was buttermilk. Beyond was the 
spring-house with cans of milk set in the cool water 
and with a trickling sound beneath the boards. From 
the spring-house there started those mysterious cow- 
paths that led down into the great gorge that cut 
the farm. Here were places so deep that only a bit 
of the sky showed and here the stones were damp. 
It was a place that seemed to lie nearer to the con- 
fusion when the world was made, and rocks lay piled 
as though a first purpose had been broken off. And 
to follow a cow-path, regardless of where it led, was, 
in those days, the essence of hazard; though all the 
while from the pastures up above there came the flat 
safe tinkling of the bells. 

The apple orchard — where Dolly was stung by the 
bee — was set on a fine breezy place at the brow of the 
hill with the valley in full sight. The trees themselves 
were old and decayed, but they were gnarled and 
crotched for easy climbing. And the apples — in 



ROADS OF MORNING 55 

particular a russet — mounted to a delicacy. On the 
other side of the valley, a half mile off as a bird would 
fly, were the buildings of a convent, and if you waited 
you might hear the twilight bell. To this day all 
distant bells come to my ears with a pleasing softness, 
as though they had been cast in a quieter world. 
Stone arrow-heads were found in a near-by field as 
often as the farmer turned up the soil in plowing. 
And because of this, a long finger of land that put 
off to the valley, was called Indian Point. Here, 
with an arm for pillow, one might lie for a long hour 
on a sunny morning and watch the shadows of clouds 
move across the lowland. A rooster crows somewhere 
far off — surely of all sounds the drowsiest. A horse 
in a field below lifts up its head and neighs. The 
leaves practice a sleepy tune. If one has the fortune 
to keep awake, here he may lie and think the thoughts 
that are born of sun and wind. 

And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages 
in us. The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the 
other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way 
the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his 
hand. The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his 
food. And as yet there is no comforting sniff from 
the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters 
engage the farmer's wife. There is as yet not a 
faintest gurgle in the kettle. 

To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall 
out of one. Is twelve o'clock never to come? Have 
Time and the Hour grown stagnant? We eat apples 



56 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

and throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt. Is 
the great round sun stuck? Have the days of Joshua 
come again? We walk a rail fence. Is it not yet 
noon? Shrewsbury clock itself — reputed by scholars 
the slowest of all possible clocks — could not so hold 
off. I snag myself — but it is nothing that shows 
when I sit. 

Ah ! At last ! My grandfather is calling from the 
house. We run back and find that the lunch is ready 
and is laid upon a table with a red oil-cloth cover. 
We apply ourselves. Silence. . . . 

The journey home started about five o'clock. 
There was one game we always played. Each of us, 
having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning 
and guessed where we would be when the sun set. 
My grandfather might say the high bridge. I 
named the Sherman House. But my brother, being 
precise, judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole. 
Beyond a certain turn — did we remember? — well, it 
would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on. 
What an excitement there was when the sun's lower 
rim was already below the horizon ! We stood on our 
knees and looked through the little window at the 
back of the phaeton. With what suspicion we re- 
garded my grandfather's driving! Or if Dolly 
lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, was 
in the plot against us? The sun sets. We cry out 
the victor. 

The sky flames with color. Then deadens in the 
east. The dusk is falling. The roads grow dark. 



ROADS OF MORNING 



57 



Where run the roads of night? While there is hght, 
you can see the course they keep across the country — 
the dust of horses' feet — a bridge — a vagrant winding 
on a hill beyond. All day long they are busy with 
the feet of men and women and children shouting. 
Then twilight comes, and the roads lead home to 
supper and the curling smoke above the roof. But 
at night where run the roads? It's dark beyond the 
candle's flare — where run the roads of night. 

My brother and I have become sleepy. We lop 
over against my grandfather — 

We awake with a start. There is a gayly lighted 
horse-car jingling beside us. The street lights show 
us into harbor. We are home at last. 




Ihz Man Of Grub Street Gooiesj 

ProTO Ris Garret 

^ ' ^^ 

HAVE COME to live this winter 
in New York City and by good 
fortune I have found rooms on a 
pleasant park. This park, which 
is but one block in extent, is so 
set off from the thoroughfares 
that it bears chiefly the traffic 
that is proper to the place itself. 
Grocery carts jog around and 
throw out their wares. Laundry 
wagons are astir. A little fat 
tailor on an occasion carries in 
an armful of newly pressed cloth- 
ing with suspenders hanging. 
Dogs are taken out to walk but are held in leash, lest 
a taste of liberty spoil them for an indoor life. The 
center of the park is laid out with grass and trees 
and pebbled paths, and about it is a high iron fence. 
Each house has a key to the enclosure. Such social 
infection, therefore, as gets inside the gates is of our 
own breeding. In the sunny hours nurses and 
children air themselves in this grass plot. Here a 
gayly painted wooden velocipede is in fashion. At 
this minute there are several pairs of fat legs 
a-straddle this contrivance. It is a velocipede as it 
was first made, without pedals. Beau Brummel — 




THE MAN OF GRUB STREET 59 

for the velocipede dates back to him — may have 
walked forth to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells 
on a vehicle not far different, but built to his greater 
stature. There is also a trickle of drays and wagons 
across the park — a mere leakage from the streets, as 
though the near-by traffic in the pressure had burst 
its pipes. But only at morning and night when the 
city collects or discharges its people, are the sidewalks 
filled. Then for a half hour the nozzle of the city 
plays a full stream on us. 

The park seems to be freer and more natural than 
the streets outside. A man goes by gesticulating as 
though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts 
her stocking on the coping below the fence with the 
freedom of a country road. A street sweeper, 
patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit the 
quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon 
the pavement in the privilege of a playground. 

My work — if anything so pleasant and unforced 
can carry the name — is done at a window that over- 
looks this park. Were it not for several high build- 
ings in my sight I might fancy that I lived in one 
of the older squares of London. There is a look of 
Thackeray about the place as though the Osbornes 
might be my neighbors. A fat man who waddles off 
his steps opposite, if he would submit to a change of 
coat, might be Jos Sedley starting for his club to eat 
his chutney. If only there were a crest above my bell- 
pull I might even expect Becky Sharp in for tea. 
Or occasionally I divert myself with the fancy that 



60 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

I am of a still older day and that I have walked in 
from Lichfield — I choose the name at hazard — with 
a tragedy in my pocket, to try my fortune. Were 
it not for the fashion of dress in the park below and 
some remnant of reason in myself, I could, in a 
winking moment, persuade myself that my room is 
a garret and my pen a quill. On such delusion, before 
I issued on the street to seek my coffee-house, I would 
adjust my wig and dust myself of snuff. 

But for my exercise and recreation — which for a 
man of Grub Street is necessary in the early hours 
of afternoon when the morning fires have fallen — I 
go outside the park. I have a wide choice for my 
wanderings. I may go into the district to the east 
and watch the children play against the curb. If 
they pitch pennies on the walk I am careful to go 
about, for fear that I distract the throw. Or if the 
stones are marked for hop-scotch, I squeeze along the 
wall. It is my intention — from which as yet my 
diffidence withholds me — to present to the winner of 
one of these contests a red apple which I shall select 
at a corner stand. Or an ice wagon pauses in its 
round, and while the man is gone there is a pleasant 
thieving of bits of ice. Each dirty cheek is stuffed 
as though a plague of mumps had fallen on the street. 
Or there may be a game of baseball — a scampering 
on the bases, a home-run down the gutter — to engage 
me for an inning. Or shinny grips the street. But 
if a street organ comes — not a mournful one-legged 
box eked out with a monkey, but a big machine with 



THE MAN OF GRUB STREET 61 

an extra man to pull — the children leave their games. 
It was but the other day that I saw six of them 
together dancing on the pavement to the music, with 
skirts and pigtails flying. There was such gladness 
in their faces that the musician, although he already 
had his nickel, gave them an extra tune. It was of 
such persuasive gayety that the number of dancers 
at once went up to ten and others wiggled to the 
rhythm. And for myself, although I am past my 
sportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, 
would inflame me to a fox-trot. Even a surly tune — 
if the handle be quickened — comes from the box with 
a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would 
fret until it came out a dancing measure. 

In this part of town, on the better streets, I some- 
times study the fashions as I see them in the shops 
and I compare them with those of uptown stores. 
Nor is there the difference one might suppose. The 
small round muff that sprang up this winter in the 
smarter shops won by only a week over the cheaper 
stores. Tan gaiters ran a pretty race. And I am 
now witness to a dead heat in a certain kind of fluffy 
rosebud dress. The fabrics are probably different, 
but no matter how you deny it, they are cut to a 
common pattern. 

In a poorer part of the city still nearer to the East 
River, where smells of garlic and worse issue from 
cellarways, I came recently on a considerable park. 
It was supplied with swings and teeters and drew 
children on its four fronts. Of a consequence the 



62 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

children of many races played together. I caught 
a Yiddish answer to an Italian question. I fancy that 
a child here could go forth at breakfast wholly a 
Hungarian and come home with a smack of Russian 
or Armenian added. The general games that merged 
the smaller groups, aided in the fusion. If this park 
is not already named — a small chance, for it shows 
the marks of age — ^it might properly be called The 
Park of the Thirty Nations. 

Or my inclination may take me to the lower city. 
Like a poor starveling I wander in the haunts of 
wealth where the buildings are piled to forty stories, 
and I spin out the ciphers in my brain in an endeavor 
to compute the amount that is laid up inside. Also, 
lest I become discontented with my poverty, I note 
the strain and worry of the faces that I meet. There 
is a story of Tolstoi in which a man is whispered by 
his god that he may possess such land as he can circle 
in a day. Until that time he had been living on a 
fertile slope of sun and shadow, with fields ample for 
his needs. But when the whisper came, at a flash, he 
pelted off across the hills. He ran all morning, but 
as the day advanced his sordid ambition broadened 
and he turned his course into a wider and still wider 
circle. Here a pleasant valley tempted him and he 
bent his path to bring it inside his mark. Here a 
fruitful upland led him off. As the day wore on he 
ran with a greater fierceness, because he knew he 
would lose everything if he did not reach his starting 
place before the sun went down. The sun was coming 



THE MAN OF GRUB STREET 63 

near the rim of earth when he toiled up the last hill. 
His feet were cut by stones, his face pinched with 
agony. He staggered toward the goal and fell across 
it while as yet there was a glint of light. But his 
effort burst his heart. Does the analogy hold on these 
narrow streets? To a few who sit in an inner office, 
Mammon has made a promise of wealth and domi- 
nation. These few run breathless to gain a mountain. 
But what have the gods whispered to the ten thousand 
who sit in the outer office, that they bend and blink 
upon their ledgers? Have the gods whispered to 
them the promise of great wealth? Alas, before them 
there lies only the dust and heat of a level road, yet 
they too are broken at the sunset. 

Less oppressive are the streets where commerce is 
more apparent. Here, unless you would be smirched, 
it is necessary to walk fast and hold your coat-tails in. 
Packing cases are going down slides. Bales are 
coming up in hoists. Barrels are rolling out of 
wagons. Crates are being lifted in. Is the exchange 
never to stop? Is no warehouse satisfied with what 
it has? English, which until now you judged a soft 
concordant language, shows here its range and 
mastery of epithet. And all about, moving and 
jostling the boxes, are men with hooks. One might 
think that in a former day Captain Cuttle had settled 
here to live and that his numerous progeny had kept 
the place. 

Often I ride on a bus top like a maharajah on an 
elephant, up near the tusks, as it were, where the view 



6J^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

is unbroken. I plan this trip so that I move counter 
to the procession that goes uptown in the late after- 
noon. Is there a scene like it in the world? The 
boulevards of Paris in times of peace are hardly so 
gay. Fifth Avenue is blocked with motor cars. 
Fashion has gone forth to select a feather. A ringlet 
has gone awry and must be mended. The Pome- 
ranian's health is served by sunlight. The Spitz 
must have an airing. Fashion has wagged its head 
upon a Chinese vase — ^has indeed squinted at it 
through a lorgnette against a fleck — and now lolls 
home to dinner. Or style has veered an inch, and it 
has been a day of fitting. At restaurant windows one 
may see the feeding of the over-fed. Men sit in club 
windows and still wear their silk hats as though there 
was no glass between them and the windy world. 
Footmen in boots and breeches sit as stiffly as though 
they were toys grown large and had metal spikes 
below to hold them to their boxes. They look like 
the iron firemen that ride on nursery fire-engines. 
For all these sights the bus top is the best place. 

And although we sit on a modest roof, the shop- 
keepers cater to us. For in many of the stores, is 
there not an upper tier of windows for our use? The 
commodities of this second story are quite as fine as 
those below. And the waxen beauties who display 
the frocks greet us in true democracy with as sweet 
a simper. 

My friend G while riding recently on a bus 

top met with an experience for which he still blushes. 



THE MAN OF GRUB STREET 65 

There was a young woman sitting directly in front 
of him, and when he came to leave, a sudden lurch 
threw him against her. When he recovered his 
footing, which was a business of some difficulty, for 
the bus pitched upon a broken pavement, what was 
his chagrin to find that a front button of his coat had 

hooked in her back hair! Luckily G was not 

seized with a panic. Rather, he labored cautiously — 
but without result. Nor could she help in the dis- 
entanglement. Their embarrassment might have 

been indefinitely prolonged — ^indeed, G was 

several blocks already down the street — ^when he 
bethought him of his knife and so cut off the button. 
As he pleasantly expressed it to the young woman, 
he would give her the choice of the button or the coat 
entire. 

Reader, are you inclined toward ferry boats? I 
cannot include those persons who journey on them 
night and morning perfunctorily. These persons 
keep their noses in their papers or sit snugly in the 
cabin. If the market is up, they can hardly be 
conscious even that they are crossing a river. Nor 
do I entirely blame them. If one kept shop on a 
breezy tip of the Delectable Mountains with all the 
regions of the world laid out below, he could not be 
expected to climb up for the hundredth time with a 
first exhilaration, or to swing his alpenstock as 
though he were on a rare holiday. If one had 
business across the Styx too often — although the 
scenery on its banks is reputed to be unusual — ^he 



66 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

might in time sit below and take to yawning. 
Father Charon might have to jog his shoulder to 
rouse him when the boat came between the further 
piers. 

But are you one of those persons who, not being 
under a daily compulsion, rides upon a ferry boat for 
the love of the trip? Being in this class myself, I 
laid my case the other night before the gateman, and 
asked his advice regarding routes. He at once 
entered sympathetically into my distemper and gave 
me a plan whereby with but a single change of piers 
I might at an expense of fourteen cents cross the 
river four times at different angles. 

It was at the end of day and a light fog rested on 
the water. Nothing was entirely lost, yet a gray 
mystery wrapped the ships and buildings. If New 
Jersey still existed it was dim and shadowy as though 
its real life had gone and but a ghost remained. 
Ferry boats were lighted in defiance of the murk, 
and darted here and there at reckless angles. An 
ocean liner was putting out, and several tugs had 
rammed their noses against her sides. There is 
something engaging about a tug. It snorts with 
eagerness. It kicks and splashes. It bursts itself to 
lend a hand. And how it butts with its nose ! Surely 
its forward cartilages are of triple strength, else in 
its zest it would jam its nasal passages. 

Presently we came opposite lower New York. 
Although the fog concealed the outlines of the 
buildings, their lights showed through. This first 



THE MAN OF GRUB STREET 



67 



hour of dark is best, before the day's work is done 
and while as yet all of the windows are lighted. The 
Woolworth Tower was suffused in a soft and shadowy 
light. The other buildings showed like mountains of 
magic pin-pricks. It was as though all the constel- 
lations of heaven on a general bidding had met for 
conference. 

The man of Grub Street, having by this time 
somewhat dispelled the fumes of dullness from his 
head, descends from his ferry boat and walks to his 
quiet park. There is a dull roar from the ele- 
vated railway on Third Avenue where the last of 
the day's crowd goes home. The sidewalks are be- 
coming empty. There is a sheen of water 
on the pavement. In the winter murk 
there is a look of Thackeray about the 
place as though the Sedleys or the Os- 
bornes might be his neighbors. 
If there were a crest above his 
bell-pull he might even expect 
Becky Sharp in for tea. 





^ISere 



HEN THE sun set last 
night it was still winter. 
The persons who passed 
northward in the dusk from the city's tumult thrust 
their hands deep into their pockets and walked to a 
sharp measure. But a change came in the night. The 
north wind fell off and a breeze blew up from the 
south. Such stars as were abroad at dawn left off 
their shrill winter piping — if it be true that stars 
really sing in their courses — and pitched their voices 
to April tunes. One star in particular that hung low 
in the west until the day was up, knew surely that 
the Spring had come and sang in concert with the 
earliest birds. There is a dull belief that these early 
birds shake off their sleep to get the worm. Rather, 
they come forth at this hour to cock their ears upon 
the general heavens for such new tunes as the unf aded 
stars still sing. If an ear is turned down to the 
rummage of worms in the earth — for to the super- 
ficial, so does the attitude attest — it is only that the 
other ear may be turned upward to catch the celestial 
harmonies; for birds know that if there is an untried 
melody in heaven it will sound first across the clear 
pastures of the dawn. All the chirping and whistling 
from the fields and trees are then but the practice of 



NOW THAT SPRING IS HERE 69 

the hour. When the meadowlark sings on a fence- 
rail she but cons her lesson from the stars. 

It is on such a bright Spring morning that the 
housewife, duster in hand, throws open her parlor 
window and looks upon the street. A pleasant park 
is below, of the size of a city square, and already it 
stirs with the day's activity. The housewife beats her 
cloth upon the sill and as the dust flies oif , she hears 
the cries and noises of the place. In a clear tenor she 
is admonished that there is an expert hereabouts to 
grind her knives. A swarthy baritone on a wagon 
lifts up his voice in praise of radishes and carrots. 
His eye roves along the windows. The crook of a 
hungry finger will bring him to a stand. Or a junk- 
man is below upon his business. Yesterday the bells 
upon his cart would have sounded sour, but this 
morning they rattle agreeably, as though a brisker 
cow than common, springtime in her hoofs, were 
jangling to her pasture. At the sound — if you are 
of country training — ^you see yourself, somewhat 
misty through the years, barefoot in a grassy lane, 
with stick in hand, urging the gentle beast. There 
is a subtle persuasion in the junkman's call. In these 
tones did the magician, bawling for old lamps, beguile 
Aladdin. If there were this morning in my lodging 
an unrubbed lamp, I would toss it from the 
window for such magic as he might extract from it. 
And if a fair Princess should be missing at the noon 
and her palace be skipped from sight, it will follow 
on the rubbing of it. 



70 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

The call of red cherries in the park — as you might 
guess from its Italian source — is set to an amorous 
tune. What lady, smocked in morning cambric, 
would not be wooed by such a voice ? The gay fellow 
tempts her to a purchase. It is but a decent caution — 
now that Spring is here — that the rascal does not call 
his wares by moonlight. As for early peas this 
morning, it is Pan himself who peddles them — 
disguised and smirched lest he be caught in the 
deception — Pan who stamps his foot and shakes the 
thicket — whose habit is to sing with reedy voice of the 
green willows that dip in sunny waters. Although he 
now clatters his tins and baskets and cries out like a 
merchant, his thoughts run to the black earth and the 
shady hollows and the sound of little streams. 

I have wondered as I have observed the housewives 
lingering at their windows — for my window also looks 
upon the park — I have wondered that these melodious 
street cries are not used generally for calling the wares 
of wider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, 
there might be a lilt devised in praise of other pleasing 
merceries — a tripping pizzicato for laces and frip- 
pery — a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. 
And should not the latest book — if it be a tale of love, 
for these I am told are best offered to the public in 
the Spring (sad tales are best for winter) — should 
not a tale of love be heralded through the city by the 
singing of a ballad, with a melting tenor in the part? 
In old days a gaudy rogue cried out upon the broader 
streets that jugglers had stretched their rope in the 



NOW THAT SPRING IS HERE 71 

market-place, but when the bears came to town, the 
news was piped even to the narrowest lanes that 
house-folk might bring their pennies. 

With my thoughts set on the Spring I chanced to 
walk recently where the theatres are thickest. It 
was on a Saturday afternoon and the walk was 
crowded with amusement seekers. Presently in the 
press I observed a queer old fellow carrying on his 
back a monstrous pack of umbrellas. He rang a bell 
monotonously and professed himself a mender of 
umbrellas. He can hardly have expected to find a 
customer in the crowd. Even a blinking eye — and 
these street merchants are shrewd in these matters — 
must have told him that in all this hurrying mass of 
people, the thoughts of no one ran toward umbrellas. 
Rather, I think that he was taking an hour from the 
routine of the day. He had trod the profitable side 
streets until truantry had taken him. But he still 
made a pretext of working at his job and called his 
wares to ease his conscience from idleness. Once 
when an unusually bright beam of sunlight fell from 
between the clouds, he tilted up his hat to get the 
warmth and I thought him guilty of a skip and 
syncopation in the ringing of his bell, as if he too 
twitched pleasantly with the Spring and his old sap 
was stirred. 

I like these persons who ply their trades upon the 
sidewalk. My hatter — the fellow who cleans my 
straw hat each Spring — is a partner of a bootblack. 
Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, 



n PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

there hangs a rusty sign proclaiming that he is famous 
for his cleaning all round the world. He is so modest 
in his looks that I have wondered whether he really 
can read the sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, 
he is not squeamish at the praise. As I have not 
previously been aware that any of his profession ever 
came to general fame except the Mad Hatter of 
Wonderland, I have squinted sharply at him to see 
if by chance it might be he, but there are no marks 
even of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring 
my hat to a marvellous whiteness and it may be true 
that he has really tended heads that are now gone 
beyond Constantinople. 

Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. 
Of this the long rag is their instrument. They draw 
it once or twice across the shoe to set the key and then 
they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there 
is an unusual genius in the bootblack — some remnant 
of ancient Greece— he plays such a lively tune that 
one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or 
other such nimble creature on the street, she would 
come leaping as though Orpheus strummed a tune, 
but the dance is too fast for our languid northern feet. 

Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our 
hearts go out to Adam in the hour of his temptation. 
I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who 
even leans toward dates if she may buy them from 
a cart. "Those dear dirty dates," she calls them, but 
I cannot share her liking for them. Although the 
cart is a beguihng market, dates so bought are too 



NOW THAT SPRING IS HERE 



73 



dusty to be eaten. They rank with the apple- John. 
The apple- John is that mysterious leathery fruit, sold 
more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans 
at the rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. 
For myself, although I do not eat apple- Johns, I like 
to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so flat, 
as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or 
rather, in the older world was there not a custom at 
a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome 
journey? If so, the apple- John came untasted to the 
end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the 
fruit. Whether my fondness for gazing at apple- 
johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child 
I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from 
the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple- 
john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger 
before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what 
its youth was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, 
it remained unheralded and unknown 
all through its fresher years and not 



until the coming of its wrinkled age 
was it at last put up to the 
common view. The apple- John 
sets up kinship with an author. 





7i PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The 
jest of the day resides in the success with which 
credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of 
easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in 
April and hold us with tales of the Anthropopagi ! 
If their heads are said to grow beneath their shoulders, 
still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but 
sure that Baron Munchausen came back from his 
travels in the Spring. When else could he have got 
an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the 
returning year — the first blue sides, the soft rains, 
the tender sproutings of green stalks without feeling 
that there is nothing beyond belief? If such miracles 
can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme 
range even of travel or metaphysics be allowed? 
What man who has smelled the first fragrance of the 
earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and 
has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold 
his credence even though the jest be plain? 

I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street 
on the next day of April fool, that you yield to the 
occasion. If an urchin points his finger at your hat, 
humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for 
a supposed defect! His glad shout will be your 
reward. Or if you are begged piteously to lift a 
stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even 
though you sniff the imposture, seize upon it with a 
will! It is thus, beneath these April skies, that you 
play your part in the pageantry that marks the day. 







YOU not confess yourself 
to be several years past that 
time of greenest youth when 
burnt cork holds its greatest 
charm? Although not fallen to 
a crippled state, are you not now 
too advanced to smudge your 
upper lip and stalk agreeably as a 
villain? Surely you can no longer 
frisk lightly in a comedy. If you 
should wheeze and limp in an old 
man's part, with back humped in 
mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the 
truth? But doubtless there was a time when you 
ranged upon these heights — ^when Kazrac the magi- 
cian was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring 
days, let us hope that you played the villain with a 
swagger, or being cast in a softer role, that you won 
a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done. 
Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the 
parlor hangings as a curtain with brown string from 
the pantry and safety pins. Although you had no 
show to offer, you said "ding" three times — as is 
the ancient custom of the stage when the actors are 
ready — and drew them wide apart. The cat was 
the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward 



16 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

your activity. A complaint that springs up in youth 
and is known as "snuffles" had kept you out of school. 
It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were 
sunk in fear of your lessons, but had abated at nine 
o'clock. Whether the cure came with a proper 
healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the 
ringing of the school bell, must be left to a cool 
judgment. 

Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie 
came on her quest for dust, you tooted once upon 
your nose, just to show that a remnant of your 
infirmity persisted, then put your golden conva- 
lescence on the making of your curtain. 

But in the early hours of afternoon when the 
children are once more upon the street, you regret 
your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and 
fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One 
would think that they were in fear lest some impish 
fact might get outside the covers to spoil the after- 
noon. Until the morrow let two and two think 
themselves five at least! And let Ohio be bounded 
as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or step 
carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear 
they spoil their suppers. Ah! — a bat goes by — a 
glove — a ball! And now from a vacant lot there 
comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention 
to be made of you — you, "molasses fingers" — the star 
left fielder — the timely batter ? What would you not 
give now for a clean bill of health? You rub your 
offending nose upon the glass. What matters it with 



THE FRIENDLY GENII 77 

what deep rascality in black miistachios you once 
strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you? 

My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of 
squeaks and shadows to all except the valiant. In it 
were low, dark corners where the night crawled in 
and slept. But in the open part where the roof was 
highest, there was the theatre. Its walls were made 
of a red cambric of a flowered pattern that still lingers 
with me, and was bought with a clatter of pennies on 
the counter, together with nickels that had escaped 
my extravagance at the soda fountain. 

A cousin and I were joint proprietors. In the 
making of it, the hammer and nails were mine by 
right of sex, while she stitched in womanish fashion 
on the fabrics. She was leading woman and I was 
either the hero or the villain as fitted to my mood. 
My younger cousin — although we scorned her for her 
youth — was admitted to the slighter parts. She 
might daub herself with cork, but it must be only 
when we were done. Nor did we allow her to carry 
the paper knife — shaped like a dagger — ^which figured 
hugely in our plots. If we gave her any word to 
speak, it was as taffy to keep her silent about some 
iniquity that we had worked against her. In general, 
we judged her to be too green and giddy for the 
heavy parts. At the most, she might take pins at the 
door — for at such a trifle we displayed our talents — 
or play upon the comb as orchestra before the rising 
of the curtain. 



78 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

The usual approach to this theatre was the kitchen 
door, and those who came to enjoy the drama sniffed 
at their very entrance the new-baked bread. A pan 
of cookies was set upon a shelf and a row of apples 
was ranged along the window sill. Of the ice-box 
around the corner, not a word, lest hunger lead you 
off! As for the cook, although her tongue was tart 
upon a just occasion and although she shooed the 
children with her apron, secretly she liked to have 
them crowding through her kitchen. 

Now if you, reader — for I assume you to be one 
of the gathering audience — ^were of the kind careful 
on scrubbing days to scrape your feet upon the iron 
outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed 
parts, then it is likely that you stood in the good 
graces of the cook. Mark your reward! As you 
journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and 
bit scallops in its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was 
in you — as conmionly comes up in the middle after- 
noon — you waived this slower method and crammed 
yourself with a recklessness that bestrewed the pur- 
lieus of your mouth. If your ears lay beyond the 
muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order. 

Is there not a story in which children are tracked 
by an ogre through the perilous wood by the crumbs 
they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogre 
lurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It 
would be near the top, farthest from the friendly 
kitchen, that the attack might come, for there the 
stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it 



THE FRIENDLY GENII 79 

was best to look sharp and to turn the corners wide. 
A brave whistling kept out the other noises. 

It was after Aladdin had been in town that the 
fires burned hottest in us. My grandfather and I 
went together to the matinee, his great thumb within 
my fist. We were frequent companions. Together 
we had sat on benches in the park and poked the 
gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. 
Although his eyes had looked longer on the world 
than mine, we seemed of an equal age. 

The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried 
a bag of candy against a sudden appetite — colt's foot, 
a penny to the stick. Here and there ushers were 
clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not 
unlike the first corn within a popper. Somewhere 
aloft there must have been a roof, else the day would 
have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It 
was as though a thrifty owner had borrowed the 
dusky fabrics of the night to make his cover. The 
curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Strat- 
ford Church and we dimly saw its spire. 

Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, 
there was a scampering to get seats in front, speed 
being whetted by a long half hour of waiting on the 
stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous 
souls of lost mountaineers — for this was the kind of 
fiction, got out of the Public Library, that had come 
last beneath my thumb — ghostly heads looked down 
upon us across the gallery rail. 

And now, if you will tip back your head like a 



80 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

paper-hanger — whose Adam's apple would seem to 
attest a life of sidereal contemplation — ^you will see 
in the center of the murk above you a single point 
of light. It is the spark that will ignite the great 
gas chandelier. I strain my neck to the point of 
breaking. My grandfather strains his too, for it is 
a game between us which shall announce the first 
spurting of the light. At last ! We cry out together. 
The spark catches the vent next to it. It runs 
around the circle of glass pendants. The whole 
blazes up. The mountaineers come to life. They 
lean forward on their elbows. 

From the wings comes the tuning of the violins. 
A flute ripples up and down in a care-free manner 
as though the villain Kazrac were already dead and 
virtue had come into its own. The orchestra emerges 
from below. Their calmness is but a pretense. 
Having looked on such sights as lie behind the 
curtain, having trod such ways, they should be 
bubbling with excitement. Yet observe the bass 
viol! How sodden is his eye! How sunken is his 
gaze! With what dull routine he draws his bow, as 
though he knew naught but sleepy tunes! If there 
be any genie in the place, as the program says, let 
him first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy! 

We consult our programs. The first scene is the 
magician's cave where he plans his evil schemes. The 
second is the Chinese city where he pretends to be 
Aladdin's uncle. And for myself, did a friendly old 
gentleman offer me lollypops and all-day-suckers — 



THE FRIENDLY GENII 



81 



for so did the glittering baubles present themselves 
across the footlights — ^like Aladdin I, too, would not 
have squinted too closely on his claim. Gladly I 
would have gone off with him on an all- day picnic 
toward the Chinese mountains. 

We see a lonely pass in the hills, the cave of jewels 
(splendid to the eye of childhood) where the slave 
of the lamp first appears, and finally the throne-room 
with Aladdin seated safely beside his princess. 

Who knows how to dip a pen within the 
twilight? Who shall trace the figures of 
the mist? The play is done. We come t- 
out in silence. Our candy is but a rem- 
nant. Darkness has fallen. The pave- 
ments are wet and shining, so 
that the night might see his 
face, if by chance the old 
fellow looked our way. 

All about I'. M; 

there are per- 
sons hurrying 
home with 




8^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

dinner-pails, who, by their dull eyes, seem never to 
have heard what wonders follow on the rubbing of 
a lamp. 

But how the fires leaped up — ^how ambition beat 
within us — ^how our attic theatre was wrought to 
perfection — ^how the play came off and wracked the 
neighborhood of its pins — ^with what grace I myself 
acted Aladdin — these things must be written by a 
vain and braggart pen. 







fir. Pepy-s Sils in the P^it 



HEN IT happens that a man 
has risen to be a member of 
Parliament, the Secretary of 
the British Navy and the Presi- 
dent of the Royal Society, when 
he has become the adviser of the 
King and is moreover the one 
really bright spot in that King's 
reign, it is amazing that consider- 
ably more than one hundred years 
after his death, when the navy 
that he nurtured dominates the seven seas, that he 
himself on a sudden should be known, not for his 
larger accomplishments, but as a kind of tavern crony 
and pot-companion. When he should be standing 
with fame secure in a solemn though dusty niche in 
the Temple of Time, it is amazing that he should be 
remembered chiefly for certain quarrels with his wife 
and as a frequenter of plays and summer gardens. 

Yet this is the fate of Samuel Pepys. Before the 
return of the Stuarts he held a poor clerkship in the 
Navy Office and cut his quill obscurely at the common 
desk. At the Restoration, partly by the boost of 
influence, but chiefly by his substantial merit, he 
mounted to several successively higher posts. The 
Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and 



8J^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

when he hecame Lord High Admiral he took Pepys 
with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684<, Pepys 
became Secretary of the Navy. When later the 
Prince of Wales became King James II, Pepys, 
although his office remained the same, came to quite 
a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd 
and capable in the conduct of his position and brought 
method to the Navy Office. He was a prime factor 
in the first development of the British Navy. Later 
victories that were to sweep the seas may be traced 
in part to him. Nelson rides upon his shoulders. 
These achievements should have made his fame 
secure. But on a sudden he gained for posterity a 
less dignified although a more interesting and 
enduring renown. 

In life, Samuel Pepys walked gravely in majestical 
robe with full-bottomed wig and with ceremonial lace 
flapping at his wrists. Every step, if his portrait is 
to be believed, was a bit of pageantry. Such was his 
fame, that if his sword but clacked a warning on the 
pavement, it must have brought the apprentices to the 
windows. Tradesmen laid down their wares to get 
a look at him. Fat men puffed and strained to gain 
the advantage of a sill. Fashionable ladies peeped 
from brocaded curtains and ogled for his regard. Or 
if he went by chair, the carriers held their noses up 
as though offended by the common air. When he 
spoke before the Commons, the galleries were hushed. 
He gave his days to the signing of stiff parchments — 
Admiralty Orders or what not. He checked the King 



MR. PEPYS SITS IN THE PIT 85 

himself at the council table. In short, he was not 
only a great personage, but also he was quite well 
aware of the fact and held himself accordingly. 

But now many years have passed, and Time, that 
has so long been at bowls with reputations, has 
acquired a moderate skill in knocking them down. 
Let us see how it fares with Pepys ! Some men who 
have been roguish in their lives have been remembered 
by their higher accomplishments. A string of sonnets 
or a novel or two, if it catches the fancy, has wiped 
out a tap-room record. The winning of a battle has 
obliterated a meanly spent youth. It is true that for 
a while an old housewife who once lived on the hero's 
street will shake a dubious finger on his early pranks. 
Stolen apples or cigarettes behind the barn cram her 
recollection. But even a village reputation fades. 
In time the sonnets and glorious battle have the upper 
place. But things went the other way with Pepys. 
Rather, his fate is like that of Zeus, who — if legend is 
to be trusted — ^was in his life a person of some impor- 
tance whose nod stirred society on Olympus, but who 
is now remembered largely for his flirtations and his 
braggart conduct. A not unlike evil has fallen on the 
magnificent Mr. Pepys. 

This fate came to him because — as the world 
knows — it happened that for a period of ten years 
in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting and 
honest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he 
was still a poor clerk living with his wife in a garret, 
and ended it in 1669, when, although he had emerged 



86 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been 
set on him. All the facts of his life during this period 
are put down, whether good or bad, small or large, 
generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent 
in work at his office, of his consultations with higher 
officials. There is much running to and fro of 
business. The Dutch war bulks to a proper length. 
Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys 
goes upon the streets in the days of the plague and 
writes the horror of it — the houses marked with red 
crosses and with prayers scratched beneath — ^the 
stench and the carrying of dead bodies. He sees the 
great fire of London from his window on the night 
it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen. 
He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his 
long travels, and afterwards when Charles is crowned, 
he records the processions and the crowds. But also 
Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on 
paper. He debauches a servant and makes a note 
of it. He describes a supper at an ale-house, and 
how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Re- 
tire," a song of his own making, and tells how his 
listeners "cried it up." 

In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now 
known chiefly for his attentions to the pretty 
actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne 
in her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" 
Mrs. Knipp, for his love of a tune upon the fiddle, 
for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry late at 
night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps 



MR. PEPYS SITS IN THE PIT 87 

we recall him best for burying his wine and Parmazan 
cheese in his garden at the time of the Fire, or for 
standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a 
"camlett cloak with gold buttons," or for sitting for 
his portrait in an Indian gown which he "hired to be 
drawn in." Who shall say that this is not the very 
portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off 
to Commons? Could the apprentices have known in 
what a borrowed majesty he walked, would they not 
have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their 
dusky fingers at him? 

Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and 
that his wife, "poor wretch," was used to make the 
fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she washed his 
"foul clothes" — that by degrees he came to be 
wealthy and rode in his own yellow coach — that his 
wife went abroad in society "in a flowered tabby 
gown" — that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and 
exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery 
for a place in the pit — and that on a rare occasion 
(doubtless when he was alone and there was but one 
seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four- 
shilling box. 

Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the 
diary, we know Pepys chiefly in his hours of ease. 
Sittings and consultations are so dry. If only the 
world would run itself decently and in silence ! Even 
a meeting of the Committee for Tangier — when the 
Prince of Wales was present and such smaller fry as 
Chancellors — is dull and is matter for a skipping eye. 



88 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph 
and it happens that there is a bit of deviltry just 
below at the bottom of the page — maybe no more 
than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's 
name pops in sight ) — bless us how the eye will hurry 
to turn the leaf on the chance of roguery to come! 
Who would read through a long discourse on 
Admiralty business, if it be known before that Pepys 
is engaged with the pretty Mrs. Knipp for a trip to 
Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that 
the start is to be made on the turning of the page? 
Or a piece of scandal about Lady Castlemaine, how 
her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart came to 
court — such things tease one from the sterner 
business. 

And for these reasons, we have been inclined to 
underestimate the importance of Pepys' diary. 
Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about Pepys, 
evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable 
fellow and that the diary was too much given to mean 
and petty things. But in reality the diary is an 
historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the 
surface, he throws out facts that can be had nowhere 
else. No one would venture to write of Restoration 
life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote 
in a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his 
wife, from whom he had reason to conceal his offenses. 
The papers lay undeciphered until 1825, when a 
partial publication was made. There were additions 
by subsequent editors until now it appears that the 



MR. PEPYS SITS IN THE PIT 89 

Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final. But ever since 
1825, the diary has been judged to be of high impor- 
tance in the understanding of the first decade of the 
Restoration. 

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, 
there are places in which a lighter show of personality 
is coincident with real historical data. Foremost are 
the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre. 

More than Charles II was restored in 1660. 
Among many things of more importance than this 
worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the 
close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. 
More than thirty years before, Puritanism had 
snuffed out its candles and driven its fiddlers to the 
streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the 
return of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to 
what kind of theatre it was that was set up in London 
about the year 1660. It was far different from the 
Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside 
and the fields to the north of the city and lodged itself 
on the better streets and squares. It no longer pat- 
terned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against 
the rain. The time had been when the theatre was 
cousin to the bear-pit. They were ranged together on 
the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like con- 
genial neighbors. But these days are past. Let 
Bartholomew Fair be as rowdy as it pleases, let 
acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark, 
the theatre has risen in the world ! It has put on a wig, 
as it were, it has tied a ribbon to itself and has become 



90 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

fashionable. And although it has taken on a few 
extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind 
and will make it feel at home in the upper circles. 

But also the theatre introduced movable scenery. 
There is an attempt toward elaboration of stage 
effect. "To the King's playhouse — " says Pepys, 
"a good scene of a town on fire." Women take parts. 
An avalanche of new plays descends on it. Even the 
old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a 
change of taste. 

But if you would really know what kind of theatre 
it was that sprang up with the Stuarts and what the 
audiences looked like and how they behaved, you must 
read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you 
can set out with him in his yellow coach for the King's 
house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hunger nips you at 
the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts 
it, for a "barrel of oysters." Then, having dusted 
5'^ourself of crumbs, you take the road again. Pres- 
ently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches 
are before you. There is a show of foppery on the 
curb and an odor of smoking links. A powdered 
beauty minces to the door. Once past the door- 
keeper, you hear the cries of the orange women going 
up and down the aisles. There is a shuffling of 
apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a 
box with a silken leg across the rail, scrawls a message 
to an actress and sends it off by Orange Moll. 
Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with the 
King. There is a craning of necks, for with her the 



MR. PEPYS SITS IN THE PIT 



91 



King openly "do discover a great deal of f amiliarit5^" 
In other boxes are other fine ladies wearing vizards 
to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board 
breaks in the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in 
the men's hair and the ladies' necks, which, writes 
Pepys, "made good sport." Or again, "A gentle- 
man of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of 
some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as 
dead ; being choked, but with much ado Orange Moll 
did thrust her finger down his throat and brought 
him to life again." Or perhaps, "I sitting behind in 
a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me hy a 
mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to 
be a very pretty lady, I was 
not troubled at it at all." 

At a change of 
scenes, Mrs. Knipp 
spies Pepys and comes 
to the pit door. He 
goes with her to the 
tiring-room. "To the 
women's shift," he 
writes, "where Nell 
was dressing herself, 
and was all unready, 
and is very pretty, 
prettier than I 
thought. . . . But to 
see how Nell cursed 
for having so few 




9^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

people in the pit, was pretty." — "But Lord! their 
confidence! and how many men do hover about them 
as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident 
they are in their talk!" Or he is whispered a bit of 
gossip, how Castlemaine is much in love with Hart, 
an actor of the house. Then Pepys goes back into the 
pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the 
play nears its end, footmen crowd forward at the 
doors. The epilogue is spoken. The fiddles squeak 
their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches. 

"Would it fit your humor," asks Mr. Pepys, when 
we have been handed to our seats, "would it fit your 
humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern for some 
burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It's 
sure that some brave company will fall in, and we 
can have a tune. We'll not heed the bellman. We'll 
sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning." 




kNCE IN a while I dream that I 
I come upon a person who is reading 
a book that I have written. In my 
pleasant dreams these persons do not 
nod sleepily upon my pages, and sometimes I fall in 
talk with them. Although they do not know who I 
am, they praise the book and name me warmly among 
my betters. In such circumstance my happy night- 
mare mounts until I ride foremost with the giants. 
If I could think that this disturbance of my sleep came 
from my diet and that these agreeable persons arose 
from a lobster or a pie, nightly at supper I would ply 
my fork recklessly among the platters. 

But in a waking state these meetings never come. 
If an article of mine is ever read at all, it is read in 
secret like the Bible. Once, indeed, in a friend's 
house I saw my book upon the table, but I suspect 
that it had been dusted and laid out for my coming. 
I request my hostess that next time, for my vanity, 
she lay the book face down upon a chair, as though 



P^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

the grocer's knock intruded. Or perhaps a huckster's 
cart broke upon her enjoyment. Let it be thought 
that a rare bargain — ^tender asparagus or the first 
strawberries of the summer — ^tempted her off my 
pages! Or maybe there was red rhubarb in the cart 
and the jolly farmer, as he journeyed up the street, 
pitched it to a pleasing melody. Dear lady, I forgive 
you. But let us hope no laundryman led you off! 
Such discord would have marred my book. 

I saw once in a public library, as I went along the 
shelves, a volume of mine which gave evidence to 
have been really read. The record in front showed 
that it had been withdrawn one time only. The card 
was blank below — but once certainly it had been read. 
I hope that the book went out on a Saturday noon 
when the spirits rise for the holiday to come, and that 
a rainy Sunday followed, so that my single reader 
was kept before his fire. A dull patter on the 
window — if one sits unbuttoned on the hearth — gives 
a zest to a languid chapter. The rattle of a storm — 
if only the room be snug — fixes the attention fast. 
Therefore, let the rain descend as though the heavens 
rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of 
the west! Let the chimney roar as it were a lion! 
And if there must be a clearing, let it hold off until 
the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for 
indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm 
who will not slip his glasses off his nose, if the clouds 
break at the hour of sunset when the earth and sky 
are filled with a green and golden light. 



TO AN UNKNOWN READER 95 

I took the book off the library shelf and timidly 
glancing across my shoulder for fear that some one 
might catch me, I looked along the pages. There was 
a thumb mark in a margin, and presently appeared 
a kindly stickiness on the paper as though an orange 
had squirted on it. Surely there had been a human 
being hereabouts. It was as certain as when Crusoe 
found the footprints in the sand. Ah, I thought, this 
fellow who sits in the firelight has caught an appetite. 
Perhaps he bit a hole and sucked the fruit, and the 
skin has burst behind. Or I wave the theory and now 
conceive that the volume was read at breakfast. If so, 
it is my comfort that in those dim hours it stood 
propped against his coffee cup. 

But the trail ended with the turning of the page. 
There were, indeed, further on, pencil checks against 
one of the paragraphs as if here the book had raised 
a faint excitement, but I could not tell whether they 
sprang up in derision or in approval. Toward the 
end there were uncut leaves, as though even my single 
reader had failed in his persistence. 

Being swept once beyond a usual caution, I la- 
mented to my friend F of the neglect in which 

readers held me, to which the above experience in a 

library was a rare exception. F offered me such 

consolation as he could, deplored the general taste and 
the decadence of the times, and said that as praise 
was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was 
able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. 
He was standing recently in a picture gallery, when 



96 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

SL long-haired man who stood before one of the 
pictures was pointed out to him as the artist who had 

painted it. At once F saw his opportunity to 

confer a pleasure, but as there is a touch of humor in 
him, he first played off a jest. Lounging forward, 
he dropped his head to one side as artistic folk do 
when they look at color. He made a knot-hole of 
his fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated 
across the room and stood with his legs apart in the 
very attitude of wisdom. He cast a stern eye upon 
the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when 

the artist was fretted to an extremity, F came 

forward and so cordially praised the picture that the 
artist, being now warmed and comforted, present^ 
excused himself in a high excitement and rushed 
away to start another picture while the pleasant spell 
was on him. 

Had I been the artist, I would have run from either 

F 's praise or disapproval. As an instance, I saw 

a friend on a late occasion coming from a bookstore 
with a volume of suspicious color beneath his arm. 
I had been avoiding that particular bookstore for a 
week because my book lay for sale on a forward table. 
And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic 
seized me and I plunged into the first doorway to 
escape. I found myself facing a soda fountain. For 
a moment, in my blur, I could not account for the 
soda fountain, or know quite how it had come into 
my life. Presently an interne — for he was jacketted 
as if he walked a hospital — asked me what I'd have. 



TO AN UNKNOWN READER 97 

Still somewhat dazed, in my discomposure, having no 
answer ready, my startled fancy ran among the signs 
and labels of the counter until I recalled that a 
bearded man once, unblushing in my presence, had 
ordered a banana flip. I got the fellow's ear and 
named it softly. Whereupon he placed a dead- 
looking banana across a mound of ice-cream, poured 
on colored juices as though to mark the fatal wound 
and offered it to me. I ate a few bites of the sickish 
mixture until the streets were safe. 

I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity. 
Possibly it arises from the fact that until recently my 
writing met with uniform rejection and failure. For 
years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might 
know how miserably I failed. I answered upon a 
question that I had given up the practice, that I now 
had no time for it, that I scribbled now and then but 
always burned it. All that while I gave my rare 
leisure and my stolen afternoons — ^the hours that 
other men give to golf and sleep and sitting together — 
these hours I gave to writing. On a holiday I was at 
it early. On Saturday when other folks were abroad, 
I sat at my desk. It was my grief that I was so poor 
a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on my 
papers if I sat beyond the usual hour. Writing was 
my obsession. I need no pity for my failures, for 
although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance, 
my deeper joy was in the writing! That joy repeated 
failures could not blunt. 

There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my 



98 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

desk with their former meaning faded, that still recall 
as I think of them the first exaltation when I wrote 
them — feverishly in a hot emotion. In those days 
I thought that I had caught the sunlight on my pen, 
and the wind and the moon and the spinning earth. 
I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose 
from the mist obedient to me. If I splashed my pen, 
in my warm regard it was the roar and fury of the 
sea. It was really no more than my youth crying 
out. And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped 
me when I tried to put them down on paper, although 
I did not know it then. Perhaps they were too 
vagrant to be held. And yet these paragraphs that 
might be mournful records of failure, fill me with no 
more than a tender recollection for the boy who wrote 
them. The worn phrases now beg their way with 
broken steps. Like shrill and piping minstrels they 
whine and crack a melody that I still remember in 
its freshness. 

But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these 
regards. Perhaps you, too, have faded papers. Or 
possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soul 
into an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manu- 
script which you would like to sell. Do not mistake 
me ! I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for these 
wares. Rather I speak as a friend who, having many 
such hidden sorrows, offers you a word of comfort. 
To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, " 'Tis common, 
my Lord." I have so many friends that have had an 
unproductive fling toward letters, that I think the 



TO AN UNKNOWN READER 99 

malady is general. So many books are published and 
flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but 
yours and theirs and mine waste away in a single 
precious copy. 

I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks — 
a federal matter as though Capital were under fire — 
would betray thousands of abandoned novels. There 
may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with 
price-sheets and stock-lists that they cannot offer 
harborage to a love tale. Standing desks in par- 
ticular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always 
chinked with these softer plots. And rarely there is 
a desk so smothered in learning — reeking so of 
scholarship — as not to admit a lighter nook for the 
tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to 

me lately that Professor B , whose word shakes 

the continent, holds in a lower drawer no fewer than 
three unpublished historical novels, each set up with 



100 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

a full quota of smugglers and red bandits. One of 
these stories deals scandalously with the abduction 
of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. 
The professor is a stoic before his class, but there's 
blood in the fellow. 

There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. 
You will recall that once, when taken to a ruined 
castle, you brooded on the dungeons until a plot 
popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint 
phrasing from the chroniclers. You stuffed it with 
soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord," you wrote 
gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God 
pity the poor sailors that take the sea this night!" 
And on you pelted with your plot to such conflicts 
and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance. 

These things you have committed. Good sir, we 
are of a common piece. Let us salute as brothers! 
And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue in 
your ways. And that j^ou may not lack matter for 
your pen, I warmly urge you, when by shrewdest 
computation you have exhausted the plots of adven- 
ture and have worn your villains thin, that you 
proceed in quieter vein. I urge you to an April 
mood, for the winds of Spring are up and daffodils 
nod across the garden. There is black earth in the 
Spring and green hilltops, and there is also the 
breath of flowers along the fences and the sound of 
water for your pen to prattle of. 



^lie of ^U Gowarbs 




AVING WRITTEN 

lately against the 
dog, several ac- 
quaintances have asked me 
to turn upon the cat, and 
they have been good, enough to furnish me with 
instances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with 
whom I recently sat at dinner, inquired of me on the 
passing of the fish, whether I had ever properly 
considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mis- 
chievous animal. One of them had mooed at her as 
she crossed a pasture and she had hastily climbed a 
fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. 
I was once taken to a Turkish bath for no other 
reason — as I was afterwards told — than that it might 
supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in 
my way. A basket of school readers was once lodged 
with me, with a request that I direct my attention to 
the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged 
to go against car conductors and customs men. On 
one occasion I received a paper of tombstone inscrip- 
tions, with a note of direction how others might be 
found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. 
A lady in whose company I camped last summer has 



102 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

asked me to give a chapter to it. We were abroad 
upon a lake in the full moon — ^we were lost upon a 
mountain — twice a canoe upset — ^there were the 
usual jests about cooking. These things might have 
filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have 
given me only a paragraph. 

But I am not disposed toward any of these sub- 
jects, least of all the cat, upon which I look — despite 
the coldness of her nature — as a harmless and com- 
forting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no 
more prey upon her morals than I would the morals 
of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slip to another 
angle of the question and say a few words about 
cowards, among whom I have already confessed that 
I number myself. 

In this year of battles, when physical courage sits 
so high, the reader — if he is swept off in the general 
opinion — ^will expect under such a title something 
caustic. He will think that I am about to loose 
against all cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as 
if old Egypt had come again. But cowardice is its 
own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even 
the sharp-toothed locust — for in the days that bor- 
dered so close upon the mastodon, the locust could 
hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we know 
today — even the locust that once spoiled the Egyp- 
tians could not now add to the grief of a coward. 

And yet — really I hesitate. I blush. My attack 
will be too intimate; for I have confessed that I am 
not the very button on the cap of bravery. I have 



A PLAGUE OF ALL COWARDS 103 

indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier 
feat than driving him because of the tallness of the 
monster and his uneasy movement, as though his legs 
were not well socketed and might fall out on a change 
of gaits. I have ridden on a camel in a side-show, but 
have found my only comfort in his hump. I have 
stroked the elephant. In a solemn hour of night I 
have gone downstairs to face a burglar. But I do 
not run singing to these dangers. While your really 
brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase to the 
moon — I write in figure — I would shake with fear 
upon a lower platform. 

Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays. 
"Tipp," says his pleasant biographer, "never mounted 
the box of a stage-coach in his life ; or leaned against 
the rails of a balcony ; or walked upon the ridge of a 
parapet ; or looked down a precipice ; or let off a gun." 
I cannot follow Tipp, it may be, to his extreme 
tremors — my hair will not rise to so close a likeness 
of the fretful porcupine — ^yet in a measure we are in 
agreement. We are, as it were, cousins, with the 
mark of our common family strong on both of us. 

There are persons who, when in your company on 
a country walk, will steal apples, not with a decent 
caution from a tree along the fence, but far afield. 
If there are grapes, they will not wait for a turn of 
the road, but will pluck them in the open. Or maybe 
in your wandering you come on a half -built house. 
You climb in through a window to look about. Here 
the stairs will go. The ice-box will be set against 



lOJ^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

this wall. But if your companion is one of valor's 
minions, he will not be satisfied with this safe and 
agreeable research — ^this mild speculation on bath- 
rooms — this innocent placing of a stove. He must 
go aloft. He has seen a ladder and yearns to climb 
it. The footing on the second story is bad enough. 
If you fall between the joists, you will clatter to the 
basement. It is hard to realize that such an open 
breezy place will ever be cosy and warm with fires, 
and that sleepy folk will here lie snugly a-bed on 
frosty mornings. But still the brazen fellow is not 
content. A ladder leads horribly to the roof. For 
myself I will climb until the tip of my nose juts out 
upon the world — until it sprouts forth to the air from 
the topmost timbers : But I will go no farther. But 
if your companion sees a scaffold around a chimney, 
he must perch on it. For him, a dizzy plank is a 
pleasant belvedere from which to view the world. 

The bravery of this kind of person is not confined 
to these few matters. If you happen to go driving 
with him, he will — if the horse is of the kind that 
distends his nostrils — on a sudden toss you the reins 
and leave you to guard him while he dispatches an 
errand. If it were a motor car there would be a brake 
to hold it. If it were a boat, you might throw out an 
anchor. A butcher's cart would have a metal drag. 
But here you sit defenseless — tied to the whim of a 
horse — greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin 
turns his head and holds you with his hard eye. There 
is a convulsive movement along his back, a preface. 



A PLAGUE OF ALL COWARDS 105 

it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend would 
have loosed the straps that run along the horse's 
flanks. Then, if any deviltry take him, he might go 
off alone and have it out. 

I have in mind a livery stable in Kalamazoo. 
Myself and another man of equal equestrianism were 
sent once to bring out a thing called a surrey and a 
pair of horses. Do you happen to be acquainted with 
Blat's Horse Food? If your way lies among the 
smaller towns, you must know its merits. They are 
proclaimed along the fences and up the telegraph 
poles. Drinking-troughs speak its virtues. Horses 
thrive on Blat's Food. They neigh for it. A flashing 
lithograph is set by way of testament wherever traffic 
turns or lingers. Do you not recall the picture? A 
great red horse rears himself on his hind legs. His 
forward hoofs are extended. He is about to trample 
someone under foot. His nostrils are wide. He is 
unduly excited. It cannot be food, it must be drink 
that stirs him. He is a fearful spectacle. 

There was such a picture on the wall of the stable. 

"Have you any horses," I asked nervously, jerking 
my thumb toward the wall, "any horses that have 
been fed on just ordinary food? Some that are a 
little tired?" 

For I remembered how Mr. Winkle once engaged 
horses to take the Pickwickians out to Manor Farm 
and what mishaps befell them on the way. 

" 'He don't shy, does he?' inquired Mr. Pickwick. 



106 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

" 'Shy, sir? — He wouldn't shy if he was to meet 
a vagginload of monkeys with their tails burnt off.' " 

But how Mr. Pickwick dropped his whip, how Mr. 
Winkle got off his tall horse to pick it up, how he 
tried in vain to remount while his horse went round 
and round, how they were all spilt out upon the 
bridge and how finally they walked to Manor Farm — 
these things are known to everybody with an inch of 
reading. 

" 'How far is it to Dingley Dell?' they asked. 

" 'Better er seven mile.' 

" 'Is it a good road?' 

" 'No, t'ant.' ... 

"The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily 
away, with the tall quadruped, for which they all felt 
the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly at 
their heels." 

"Have you any horses," I repeated, "that have not 
been fed on Blat's Food — horses that are, so to speak, 
on a diet?" 

In the farthest stalls, hidden from the sunlight and 
the invigorating infection of the day, two beasts were 
found with sunken chests and hollow eyes, who took 
us safely to our destination on their hands and knees. 

As you may suspect, I do not enjoy riding. There 
is, it is true, one saddle horse in North Carolina that 
fears me. If time still spares him, that horse I could 
ride with content. But I would rather trust myself 
on the top of a wobbly step-ladder than up the sides 
of most horses. I am not quite of a mind, however, 



A PLAGUE OF ALL COWARDS 107 

with Samuel Richardson who owned a hobby-horse 
and rode on his hearth-rug in the intervals of writing 
"Pamela." It is likely that when he had rescued her 
from an adventure of more than usual danger — 
perhaps her villainous master has been concealed in 
her closet — perhaps he has been hiding beneath her 
bed — it is likely, having brought her safely off, the 
author locked her in the buttery against a fresh 
attack. Then he felt, good man, in need of exercise. 
So while he waits for tea and muffins, he leaps upon 
his rocking-horse and prances off. As for the hobby- 
horse itself, I have not heard whether it was of the 
usual nursery type, or whether it was built in the 
likeness of the leather camels of a German steamship. 

I need hardly say that these confessions of my 
cowardice are for your ear alone. They must not 
get abroad to smirch me. If on a country walk I 
have taken to my heels, you must not twit me with 
poltroonery. If you charge me with such faint- 
heartedness while other persons are present, I'll deny 
it flat. When I sit in the company of ladies at dinner, 
I dissemble my true nature, as doublet and hose ought 
to show itself courageous to petticoat. If then, you 
taunt me, for want of a better escape, I shall turn it 
to a jest. I shall engage the table flippantly: Hear 
how preposterously the fellow talks! — he jests to 
satisfy a grudge. In appearance I am whole as the 
marble, founded as a rock. 

But really some of us cowards are diverting 
persons. The lady who directed me against the cow 



108 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

is a most delightful woman with whom I hope I shall 
again sit at dinner. A witty lady of my acquaintance 
shivers when a cat walks in the room. A man with 
whom I pass the time pleasantly and profitably, 
although he will not admit a fear of ghosts, still will 
not sleep in an empty house because of possible 
noises. I would rather spend a Saturday evening in 
the company of the cowardly Falstaff than of the 
bold Hotspur. If it were not for sack, villainous 
sack, and a few spots upon his front, you would go 
far to find a better companion than the fat old Knight. 
Bob Acres was not much for valor and he made an 
ass of himself when he went to fight a duel, yet one 
could have sat agreeably at mutton with him. 

But these things are slight. It matters little 
whether or not one can mount a ladder comfortably. 
Now that motors have come in, horses stand remotely 
in our lives. Nor is it of great moment whether or 
not we fear to be out of fashion — ^whether we halt in 
the wearing of a wrong-shaped hat, or glance fear- 
fully around when we choose from a line of forks. 
Superstitions rest mostly on the surface and are not 
deadly in themselves. A man can be true of heart 
even if he will not sit thirteen at table. But there 
is a kind of fear that is disastrous to them that have 
it. It is the fear of the material universe in all its 
manifestations. There are persons, stout both of 
chest and limb, who fear drafts and wet feet. A 
man who is an elephant of valor and who has been 
feeling this long while a gentle contempt for such as 



A PLAGUE OF ALL COWARDS 



109 



myself, will cry out if a soft breeze strikes against 
his neck. If a foot slips to the gutter and becomes 
wet, he will dose himself. Achilles did not more 
carefully nurse his heel. For him the lofty dome of 
air is packed with malignant germs. The round 
world is bottled with contagion. A strong man 
who, in his time, might have slain the Sofi, is as 
fearful of his health as though the 
plague were up the street. Calamities /^>Xv 

beset him. The slightest sniffling in his 
nose is the trumpet for 
a deep disorder. Ex- 
istence is but a mov- 
ing hazard. Life for 
him, poor fellow, 
is but a room 
with a window on 
the night and a 
storm beating on 
the casement. 
God knows, it is 
better to grow 
giddy on a lad- 
der than to think 
that this majestic 
earth is such an 
universal pesti- 
lence. 





ervties oTlhe GarV 
British Reviewers 



B' 



OOK REVIEWERS nowa- 
days direct their attention, for 
the most part, to the worthy 
books and they habitually neg- 
lect those that seem beneath their regard. On a rare 
occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even 
this is often but a bit of practice. They swish la 
bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their 
anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close 
housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe 
they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they 
think that their pages grow dull and that ridicule will 
restore the balance. They throw it in like a drunken 
porter to relieve a solemn scene. I fancy that editors 
of this baser sort keep on their shelves one or two 
volumes for their readers' sport and mirth. I read 
recently a review of an historical romance — a last 
faltering descendant of the race — ^whose author in an 
endeavor to restore the past, had made too free a use 
of obsolete words. With what playfulness was he 
held up to scorn! Mary come tip, sweet chuck! How 
his quaint phrasing was turned against him! What 
a merry fellow it is who writes, how sharp and caustic ! 
There's pepper on his mood. 

But generally, it is said, book reviews are too 
flattering. Professor Bliss Perry, being of this 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 111 

opinion, offered some time ago a statement that 
"Magazine writing about current books is for the 
most part bland, complaisant, pulpy. . . . The Peda- 
gogue no longer gets a chance at the gifted young 
rascal who needs, first and foremost, a premonitory 
whipping; the youthful genius simply stays away 
from school and carries his unwhipped talents into 
the market place." At a somewhat different angle 
of the same opinion, Dr. Crothers suggests in an essay 
that instead of being directed to the best books, we 
need to be warned from the worst. He proposes to 
set up a list of the Hundred Worst Books. For is 
it not better, he asks, to put a lighthouse on a reef 
than in the channel? The open sea does not need a 
bell-buoy to sound its depth. 

On these hints I have read some of the book 
criticisms of days past to learn whether they too were 
pulpy — whether our present silken criticism always 
wore its gloves and perfumed itself, or whether it has 
fallen to this smiling senility from a sterner youth. 
Although I am usually a rusty student, yet by 
diligence I have sought to mend my knowledge that 
I might lay it out before you. Lately, therefore, if 
you had come within our Public Library, you would 
have found me in one of these attempts. Here I went, 
scrimping the other business of the day in order that 
I might be at my studies before the rush set in up 
town. Mine was the alcove farthest from the door, 
where are the mustier volumes that fit a bookish 
student. So if your quest was the lighter books — 



11^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

such verse and novels as present fame attests — jou 
did not find me. I was hooped and bowed around 
the corner. I am no real scholar, but I study on a 
spurt. For a whole week together I may read old 
plays until their jigging style infects my own. I 
have set myself against the lofty histories, although 
I tire upon their lower slopes and have not yet 
persisted to their upper and windier ridges. I have, 
also, a pretty knowledge of the Queen Anne wits and 
feel that I must have dogged and spied upon them 
while they were yet alive. But in general, although 
I am curious in the earlier chapters of learning, I lag 
in the inner windings. However, for a fortnight I 
have sat piled about with old reviews, whose leather 
rots and smells, in order that I might study the fading 
criticisms of the past. 

Until rather near the end of the eighteenth century, 
those who made their living in England by writing 
were chiefly publishers' hacks, fellows of the Dunciad 
sucking their quills in garrets and selling their labor 
for a crust, for the reading public was too small to 
support them. Or they found a patron and gave him 
a sugared sonnet for a pittance, or strained themselves 
to the length of an Ode for a berth in his household. 
Or frequently they supported a political party and 
received a place in the Red Tape Office. But even 
in politics, on account of the smallness of the reading 
public and the politicians' indifference to its approval, 
their services were of slight account. Too often a 
political office was granted from a pocket borough 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 113 

in which a restricted electorate could be bought at a 
trifling expense. To gain support inside the House 
of Commons was enough. The greater public outside 
could be ignored. This attitude changed with the 
coming of the French Revolution. Here was a new 
force unrealized before — that of a crowd which, being 
unrepresented and with a real grievance, could, when 
it liked, take a club and go after what it wanted. For 
the first time in many years in England — such were 
the whiffs of liberty across the Channel — the power of 
an unrepresented public came to be known. It was 
not that the English crowd had as yet taken the club 
in its hands, but there were new thoughts abroad in 
the world, and there was the possibility to be regarded. 
To influence this larger public, therefore, men who 
could write came little by little into a larger demand. 
And as writers were comparatively scarce, all kinds — 
whether they wrote poems or prose — ^were pressed 
into service. It is significant, too, that it was in the 
decades subjected to the first influence of the French 
Revolution that the English daily paper took its start 
as an agent to influence public opinion. 

It was therefore rather more than one hundred 
years ago that writers came to a better prosperity. 
They came out of their garrets, took rooms on the 
second floor, polished their brasses and became 
Persons. I can fancy that a writer after spending 
a morning in the composition of a political article on 
the whisper of a Cabinet Minister, wrote a sonnet 
after lunch, and a book review before dinner. Let 



lU PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

us see in what mood they took their advancement ! 
Let us examine their temper — but in book reviewing 
only, for that alone concerns us! In doing this, we 
have the advantage of knowing the final estimate of 
the books they judged. Like the witch, we have 
looked into the seeds of time and we know "which 
grain will grow and which will not." 

In 1802, when the Edinburgh Review (which was 
the first of its line to acquire distinction) came into 
being, the passion of the times found voice in politics. 
Both Whigs and Tories had been alarmed by the 
excesses of the French Revolution; both feared that 
England was drifting the way of France; each had 
a remedy, but opposed and violently maintained. 
The Tories put the blame of the Revolution on the 
compromises of Louis XVI, and accordingly they 
were hostile to any political change. The Whigs, on 
the other hand, saw the rottenness of England as a 
cause that would incite her to revolution also, and 
they advocated reform while yet there was time. The 
general fear of a revolution gave the government of 
England to the Tories, and kept them in power for 
several decades. And England was ripe for trouble. 
The government was but nominally representative. 
No Catholic, Jew, Dissenter or poor man had a vote 
or could hold a seat in Parliament. Industrially and 
economically the country was in the condition of 
France in the year of Arthur Young's journey. The 
poverty was abject, the relief futile and the hatred 
of the poor for the rich was inflammatory. George 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 115 

III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous 
of his unconstitutional power, was a vacillating 
despot, quarrelling with his Commons and his 
Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as 
nearly the control of a Premier as the King would 
allow, was the staunch upholder of all things that 
have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot 
said of him that "he believed in everything which it 
is impossible to believe in." France and Napoleon 
threatened across the narrow channel. England still 
growled at the loss of her American colonies. It was 
as yet the England of the old regime. The great 
reforms were to come thirty years later — ^the Catholic 
Emancipation, the abolishment of slavery in the 
colonies, the suppression of the pocket boroughs, the 
gross bribery of elections, the cleaning of the poor 
laws and the courts of justice. 

It was in this dark hour of English history that the 
writers polished their brasses and set up as Persons. 
And if the leading articles that they wrote of morn- 
ings stung and snapped with venom, it is natural that 
the book reviews on which they spent their afternoons 
had also some vinegar in them, especially if they 
concerned books written by those of the opposition. 
And other writers, even if they had no political 
connection, borrowed their manners from those who 
had. It was the animosities of party politics that set 
the general tone. Billingsgate that had grown along 
the wharves of the lower river, was found to be of 
service in Parliament and gave a spice and sparkle 



116 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

even to a book review. Presently a large part of 
literary England wore the tags of political prefer- 
ence. Writers were often as clearly distinguished as 
were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote 
his paper on party patches. There were seats of 
Moral Philosophy to be handed out, under-secretary- 
ships, consular appointments. It is not enough to 
say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as 
well a Whig and was running a Review that was 
Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt 
was not merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and 
therefore in the opinions of Tories, a believer in 
immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent 
a title might appear, it was held in suspicion, on the 
chance that it assailed the Ministry or endangered 
the purity of England. William Gifford was more 
than merely the editor of the Quarterly Review, for 
he was as well a Tory editor whose duty it was to pry 
into Whiggish roguery. Lockhart and Wilson, who 
wrote in Blackwood's, were Tories tooth and nail, 
biting and scratching for party. Nowadays, litera- 
ture, having found the public to be its most profitable 
patron, works hard and even abjectly for its favor. 
Although there are defects in the arrangement, it 
must be confessed that the divorce of literature from 
politics contributes to the general peace of the 
household. 

The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, the 
Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood's Magazine in 
1817. These three won distinction among others of 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 117 

less importance, and from them only I quote. In 
1802, when Tory rule was strongest and Lord Eldon 
flourished, there was living in Edinburgh a group 
of young men who were for the most part briefless 
barristers. Their case was worse because they were 
Whigs. Few cases came their way and no offices. 
These young men were Francis Jeffrey, Francis 
Horner, Henry Brougham, and there was also 
Sydney Smith who had just come to Edinburgh from 
an English country parish. The eldest was thirty- 
one, the youngest twenty-three. Although all of 
them had brilliant lives before them, not one of them 
had made as yet more than a step toward his accom- 
plishment. Sydney Smith had been but lately an 
obscure curate, buried in the middle of Salisbury 
Plain, away from all contact with the world. Francis 
Jeffrey had been a hack writer in London, had studied 
medicine, had sought unsuccessfully a government 
position in India, had written poor sonnets, and was 
now lounging with but a scanty occupation in the 
halls of the law courts. Francis Horner had just 
come to the Scottish bar straight from his studies. 
Henry Brougham, who in days to come was to be 
Lord Chancellor of England and to whose skill in 
debate the passing of the Great Reform bill of 1832 
is partly due, is also just admitted to the practice 
of the law. 

The founding of the Review was casual. These 
men were accustomed to meet of an evening for 
general discussion and speculation. It happened one 



118 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

night as they sat together — ^the place was a garret if 
legend is to be believed — that Sydney Smith lamented 
that their discussions came to nothing, for they were 
all Whigs, all converted to the cause ; whereas if they 
could only bring their opinions to the outside public 
they could stir opinion. From so slight a root the 
Review sprouted. Sydney Smith was made editor 
and kept the position until after the appearance of 
the first number, when Jeffrey succeeded him. The 
Review became immediately a power, appearing 
quarterly and striking its blows anonymously against 
a sluggish government, lashing the Tory writers, and 
taking its part, which is of greater consequence, in 
the promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to 
ripen in thirty years and convert the old into modern 
England. In the destruction of outworn things, it 
was, as it were, a magazine of Whig explosives. 

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and 
it was Tory. John Murray, the London publisher, 
had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh 
Review. In 1809, two considerations moved him to 
found in London a review to rival the Scotch periodi- 
cal. First the Tory party was being hard hit by the 
Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense 
and retaliation. In the second place, John Murray 
saw that if his publishing house was to flourish, it 
must provide this new form of literature that had 
become so popular. For the very shortness of the 
essays and articles, in which extensive conditions were 
summarized for quick digestion, had met with English 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 119 

approval as well as Scotch. People had become 
accustomed, says Bagehot, of taking "their literature 
in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey." 
Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, 
for assistance and was introduced to William Giiford 
as a man capable of the undertaking, who would also 
meet the favor of the government party. The rise 
of the Quarterly Review was not brilliant. It did 
not fill the craving for novelty, inasmuch as the 
Edinburgh was already in the field. Furthermore, 
there is not the opportunity in defense for as con- 
spicuous gallantry as in offensive warfare. 

It was eight years before another enduring review 
was started. William Blackwood of Edinburgh had 
grown like Murray from a bookseller to a publisher, 
and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his 
prestige. He had launched a review the year pre- 
viously, in 1816, but it had foundered when it was 
scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was 
determined must be successful. His new editors were 
John G. Lockhart and John Wilson, and the new 
policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last 
the magazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into 
public notice by sensational articles and personal 
vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart 
twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. 
In their pages is found the most abominable raving 
that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did 
not need any party hatred to fire them. William 
Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his maga- 



IW PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

zine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." 
Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a 
place in its pages. 

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, 
we may be sure, set up a roar of delight and anger. 
Never before had one's friends been so assailed. 
Never before had one's enemies been so grilled. How 
pleasing for a Tory fireside was the mud bath with 
which it defiled Coleridge, who was — and you had 
always known it — "little better than a rogue." One's 
Tory dinner was the more toothsome for the hot 
abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript. What stout Tory, 
indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! 
There followed of course cases of libel. The editors 
even found it safer, after the publication of the first 
number, to retire for a time to the country until the 
city cooled. 

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three 
reviews and set out before you samples of their 
criticisms, in order that you may contrast them with 
our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness 
that I have been disposed to choose the worst, yet 
there are hundreds of other criticisms but little better. 
Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the least 
seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifica- 
tions are the worst. The Edinburgh Review, the 
most able of the three and the most in earnest in 
politics, is the least vituperative. With this intro- 
duction, let us shake the pepperpot and lay out the 
strong vinegar of our feast ! 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS m 

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom 
Moore, who had just pubHshed his "Odes and 
Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, 
is a man who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some 
show of classical erudition . . . may boast, if the 
boast can please him, of being the most licentious of 
modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, 
in our times, have devoted their talents to the propa- 
gation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, 
as a public nuisance. . . . He sits down to ransact 
the impure places of his memory for inflammatory 
images and expressions, and commits them labo- 
riously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating 
pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting 
readers." 

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged 
him to fight. The police interfered, and as Jeffrey 
put it, "the affair ended amicably. We have since 
breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed 
penitence for what he has written and declared that 
he will never again apply any little talents he may 
possess to such purpose : and I have said that I shall 
be happy to praise him whenever I find that he has 
abjured these objectionable topics." It was Sydney 
Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "damn the solar 
system — bad light — planets too distant — pestered 
with comets. Feeble contrivance — could make a 
better with great ease." 

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the 
"Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silli- 



m PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

ness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childish- 
ness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. 
He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas 
to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that 
"if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as 
an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot 
be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" 
was published — ^no prime favorite, I confess, of my 
own — Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of being 
the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a 
quarto volume. "It seems to us," he wrote, "to 
consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any 
of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. 
It is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy 
of that school might be supposed to have devised, on 
purpose to make it ridiculous." 

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early 
volume, is counselled "that he do forthwith abandon 
poetry . . . the mere rhyming of the final syllable, 
even when accompanied by the presence of a certain 
number of feet ... is not the whole art of poetry. 
We would entreat him to believe," continued the 
reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, some- 
what of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem ; and 
that a poem in the present day, to be read, must 
contain at least one thought. . . ." It was this 
attack that brought forth Byron's "English Bards 
and Scotch Reviewers." 

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write 
for the Edinburgh Review, he treated him with some 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 12S 

favor. But Southey took up with the Quarterly. 
"The Laureate," says the Edinburgh presently, "has 
now been out of song for a long time: But we had 
comforted ourselves with the supposition that he was 
only growing fat and lazy. . . . The strain, however, 
of this publication, and indeed of some that went 
before it, makes us apprehensive that a worse thing 
has befallen him . . . that the worthy inditer of epics 
is falling gently into dotage." 

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can 
show an equal spleen ! 

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth 
century a woman by the name of Lady Morgan, who 
was the author of several novels and books of travel. 
Although her record in intelligence and morals is 
good, John Croker, who regularly reviewed her 
books, accuses her works of licentiousness, profligacy, 
irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and 
atheism. There are twenty-six pages of this in one 
review only, and any paragraph would be worth the 
quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it was 
Macaulay who said he hated Croker like "cold boiled 
veal." 

The Quarterly reviewed Keats' "Endymion," al- 
though the writer naively states at the outset that he 
has not read the poem. "Not that we have been 
wanting in our duty," he writes, "far from it — 
indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman 
as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; 
but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we 



lU PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

are forced to confess that we have not been able to 
struggle beyond the first of the four books. . . ." 
Finally he questions whether Keats is the author's 
name, for he doubts "that any man in his senses would 
put his real name to such a rhapsody." 

Leigh Hunt's "Rimini" the Quarterly finds to be 
an "ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon, 
such as we believe was never before spoken, much less 
written. . . . We never," concludes the reviewer, 
"in so few lines saw so many clear marks of the 
vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious and 
ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with 
coarse flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of 
birth and education, and fidget himself into the stout- 
heartedness of being familiar with a Lord." In a 
later review. Hunt is a propounder of atheism. 
"Henceforth," says the reviewer, ". . . he may 
slander a few more eminent characters, he may go 
on to deride venerable and holy institutions, he may 
stir up more discontent and sedition, but he will have 
no peace of mind within ... he will live and die 
unhonoured in his own generation, and, for his own 
sake it is to be hoped, moulder unknown in those which 
are to follow." 

Hazlitt belongs to a "class of men by whom litera- 
ture is more than at any period disgraced." His 
style is suited for washerwomen, a "class of females 
with whom ... he and his friend Mr. Hunt particu- 
larly delight to associate." 

Shelley, writes the Quarterly, "is one of that 



THE EARLY BRITISH REVIEWERS 



125 



industrious knot of authors, the tendency of whose 
works we have in our late Numbers exposed to the 
caution of our readers . . . for with perfect dehb- 
eration and the steadiest perseverance he perverts all 
the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both 
public and private, which his faculties enable him to 
perpetrate." His "poetry is in general a mere jumble 
of words and heterogeneous ideas." "The Cloud" is 
"simple nonsense." "Prometheus Unbound" is a 
"great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible." 
In the "Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning." And 
for Shelley himself, he is guilty of a great many 
terrible things, including verbiage, impiety, immor- 
ality and absurdity. 

Of Blackwood's Magazine the special victims were 
Keats and Hunt and Coleridge. "Mr. Coleridge," 
says the reviewer, ". . . seems to believe that every 
tongue is wagging in his praise — that every ear is 
open to imbibe the oracular breathings 
of his inspiration ... no sound is so 
sweet to him as that of 
his own voice ... he 
seems to consider the 
mighty universe 
itself as nothing 
better than a 
mirror i n 
which, with 



a grinning 
and idiot 




126 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiog- 
nomy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. . . . Yet insig- 
nificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen to paper 
without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon 
him. . . ." 

Leigh Hunt, says Blackwood, "is a man of ex- 
travagant pretensions . . . exquisitely bad taste and 
extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His "Rimini" 
"is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its 
pretense, affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vul- 
garity, irreverence, quackery, glittering and rancid 
obscenities." 

Blackwood's wrote of the "calm, settled, imper- 
turbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and else- 
where of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently 
meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar. . . . 
It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to 
be a starved apothecary than a starved poet ; so back 
to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and 
ointment boxes.' " And even when Shelley wrote 
his "Adonais" on the death of Keats, Blackwood's 
met it with a contemptible parody: 

"Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!" 

Perhaps I have quoted enough. This is the parent- 
age of our silken and flattering criticism. 

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the 
shelves. From them there comes a smell of rotting 
leather, as though the infection spreads. The hour 
grows late. Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I 
detect the morning to be near. 




e l^ursmt of Fire 



lEADER, IF by chance you 
have the habit of writ- 
ing — ^whether they be ser- 
mons to hurl across your 
pews, or sonnets in the 
Spring — doubtless you have 
moments when you sit at 
your desk bare of thoughts. 
Mother Hubbard's cupboard 
when she went to seek the 
bone was not more empty. In such plight you chew 
your pencil as though it were stuff to feed your brain. 
Or if you are of delicate taste, you fall upon your 
fingers. Or in the hope that exercise will stir your 
wits, you pace up and down the room and press your 
nose upon the window if perhaps the grocer's boy 
shall rouse you. Some persons draw pictures on 
their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters — for 
talent varies — or they roughen up their hair. I knew 
one gifted fellow whose shoes presently would cramp 
him until he kicked them off, when at once the juices 
of his intellect would flow. Genius, I am told, some- 
times locks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its 
outer wrappings. Or, in your poverty, you run 
through the pages of a favorite volume, with a note- 



128 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

book for a sly theft to start you off. In what dejec- 
tion you have fallen ! It is best that you put on your 
hat and take your stupid self abroad. 

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will 
blaze, if instead of throwing in your wet raw thoughts, 
you feed it a few seasoned bits. You open, therefore, 
the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected 
and broken fragments — for your past has not been 
prosperous — hopeful against experience that you can 
recast one of these to your present mood. This is 
mournful business. Certain paragraphs that came 
from you hot are now patched and shivery. Their 
finer meaning has run out between the lines as though 
these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of 
the page. You had best put on your hat. You will 
get no comfort from these stale papers. 

One evening lately, being in this plight, I spread 
out before me certain odds and ends. I had dug 
deeper than usual in the drawer and had brought up 
a yellow stratum of a considerable age. I was poring 
upon these papers and was wondering whether I could 
fit them to a newer measure, when I heard a slight 
noise behind me. I glanced around and saw that a 
man had entered the room and was now seated in a 
chair before the fire. In the common nature of things 
this should have been startling, for the hour was 
late — twelve o'clock had struck across the way — and 
I had thought that I was quite alone. But there was 
something so friendly and easy in his attitude — ^he 
was a young man, little more than a lanky boy — that 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 129 

instead of being frightened, I swung calmly around 
for a better look. He sat with his legs stretched 
before him and with his chin resting in his hand, as 
though in thought. By the light that fell on him from 
the fire, I saw that he wore a brown checked suit and 
that he was clean and respectable in appearance. 
His face was in shadow. 

"Good evening," I said, "you startled me." 

"I am sorry," he replied. "I beg your pardon. 
I was going by and I saw your light. I wished to 
make your acquaintance. But I saw at once that 
I was intruding, so I sat here. You were quite 
absorbed. Would you mind if I mended the fire?" 

Without waiting for an answer, he took the poker 
and dealt the logs several blows. It didn't greatly 
help the flame, but he poked with such enjoyment that 
I smiled. I have myself rather a liking for stirring 
a fire. He set another log in place. Then he drew 
from his pocket a handful of dried orange peel. "I 
love to see it burn," he said. "It crackles and spits." 
He ranged the peel upon the log where the flame 
would get it, and then settled himself in the big chair. 

"Perhaps you smoke?" I asked, pushing toward 
him a box of cigarettes. 

He smiled. "I thought that you would know my 
habits. I don't smoke." 

"So you were going by and came up to see me?" 
I asked. 

"Yes. I was not sure that I would know you. 
You are a little older than I thought, a little — 



130 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

stouter, but dear me, how you have lost your hair! 
But you have quite forgotten me." 

"JNIy dear boy," I said, "y^^ have the advantage of 
me. Where have I seen you? There is something 
famiHar about you and I am sure that I have seen 
that brown suit before." 

"We have never really known each other," the boy 
replied. "We met once, but only for an instant. 
But I have thought of you since that meeting a great 
many times. I lay this afternoon on a hilltop and 
wondered what you would be like. But I hoped that 
sometimes you would think of me. Perhaps you have 
forgotten that I used to collect railway maps and 
time-tables." 

"Did you?" I replied. "So did I when I was a 
little younger than you are. Perhaps if I might see 
your face, I would know you." 

"It's nothing for show," he replied, and he kept 
it still in shadow. "Would you mind," he said at 
length, "if I ate an apple?" He took one from his 
pocket and broke it in his hands. "You eat half," 
he said. 

I accepted the part he offered me. "Perhaps you 
would like a knife and plate," I said. "I can find 
them in the pantry." 

"Not for me," he replied. "I prefer to eat mine 
this way." He took an enveloping bite. 

"I myself care nothing for plates," I said. We 
ate in silence. Presently: "You have my habit," I 
said, "of eating everything, skin, seeds and all." 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 131 

"Everything but the stem," he replied. 

By this time the orange peel was hissing and 
exploding. 

"You are an odd boy," I said. "I used to put 
orange peel away to dry in order to burn it. We 
seem to be as like as two peas." 

"I wonder," he said, "if that is so." He turned in 
his chair and faced me, although his face was still 
in shadow. "Doubtless, we are far different in many 
things. Do you swallow grape seeds?" 

"Hardly!" I cried. "I spit them out." 

"I am glad of that." He paused. "It was a breezy 
hilltop where I lay. I thought of you all afternoon. 
You are famous, of course?" 

"Dear me, no!" 

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I had hoped you might be. I 
had counted on it. It is very disappointing. I was 
thinking about that as I lay on the hill. But aren't 
you just on the point of doing something that will 
make you famous?" 

"By no means." 

"Dear me, I am so sorry. Do you happen to be 
married?" 

"Yes." 

"And would you mind telling me her name?" 

I obliged him. 

"I don't remember to have heard of her. I didn't 
think of that name once as I lay upon the hill. 
Things don't turn out as one might expect. Now, 
I would have thought — but it's no matter." 



132 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

For a moment or so he was lost in thought, and 
then he spoke again: "You were writing when I 
came into the room?" 

"Nothing important." 

The boy ran his fingers in his hair and threw out 
his arms impatiently. "That's what I would like to 
do. I am in college, and I try for one of the papers. 
But my stuff comes back. But this summer in the 
vacation, I am working in an office. I run errands 
and when there is nothing else to do, I study a big 
invoice book, so as to get the names of things that are 
bought. There is a racket of drays and wagons 
outside the windows, and along in the middle of the 
afternoon I get tired and thick in my head. But I 
write Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings." 

The boy stopped and fixed his eyes on me. "I 
don't suppose that you happen to be a poet?" 

"Not at all," I replied. "But perhaps you are one. 
Tell me about it!" 

The boy took a turn at the fire with the poker, but 
it was chiefly in embarrassment. Presently he 
returned to his chair. He stretched his long arms 
upward above his head. 

"No, I'm not," he said. "And yet sometimes I 
think that I have a kind of poetry in me. Only I 
can't get it into words. I lay thinking about that, 
too, on the hillside. There was a wind above my head, 
and I thought that I could almost put words to the 
tune. But I have never written a single poem. 
Yet, goodness me, what thoughts I have! But they 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 133 

aren't real thoughts — what you would regularly call 
thoughts. Things go racing and tingling in my head, 
but I can never get them down. They are just 
feelings." 

As he spoke, the boy gazed intently through the 
chimney bricks out into another world. The fire- 
place was its portal and he seemed to wait for the 
fires to cool before entering into its possession. It 
was several moments before he spoke again. 

"I don't want you to think me ridiculous, but so 
few understand. If only I could master the tools! 
Perhaps my thoughts are old, but they come to me 
with such freshness and they are so unexpected. 
Could I only solve the frets and spaces inside me 
here, I could play what tune I chose. But my feel- 
ings are cold and stale before I can get them into 
thoughts. I have no doubt, however, that they are 
just as real as those other feelings that in time, after 
much scratching, get into final form and become 
poetry. I know of course that a man's reach should 
exceed his grasp — it's hackneyed enough — but just 
for once I would like to pull down something when 
I have been up on tiptoe for a while. 

"Sometimes I get an impression of pity — a glance 
up a dark hallway — an old woman with a shawl upon 
her head — a white face at a window — a blind fiddler 
in the street — ^but the impression is gone in a moment. 
Or a touch of beauty gets me. It may be nothing but 
a street organ in the spring. Perhaps you like street 
organs, too?" 



ISJ^ PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

"I do, indeed!" I cried. "There was one today- 
out side my window and my feet kept wiggling to it." 

The boy clapped his hands. "I knew that you 
would be like that. I hoped for it on the hill. As 
for me, when I hear one, I'm so glad that I could cry 
out. In its lilt there is the rhythm of life. It moves 
me more than a hillside with its earliest flowers. Am 
I absurd? It is equal to the pipe of birds, to shallow 
waters and the sound of wind to stir me to thoughts 
of April. Today as I came downtown, I saw several 
merry fellows dancing on the curb. There are tunes, 
too, upon the piano that send me off. I play a little 
myself. I see you have a piano. Do you still play?" 

"A little, rather sadly," I replied. 

"That's too bad, but perhaps you sing?" 

"Even worse." 

"Dear me, that's too bad. I have rather a voice 
myself. Well, as I was saying, when I hear those 
tunes, I curl up with the smoke and blow forth from 
the chimney. If I walk upon the street when the 
wind is up, and see a light fleece of smoke coming 
from a chimney top, I think that down below some- 
one is listening to music that he likes, and that his 
thoughts ride upon the night, like those white 
streamers of smoke. And then I think of castles and 
mountains and high places and the sounds of storm. 
Or in fancy I see a tower that tapers to the moon with 
a silver gleam upon it." 

The. strange boy lay back and laughed. "Musi- 
cians think that they are the only ones that can hear 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 135 

the finer sounds. If one of us common fellows cocks 
his ear, they think that only the coarser thumps get 
inside. And artists think that they alone know the 
glory of color. I was thinking of that, this afternoon. 
And yet I have walked under the blue sky. I have 
seen twilights that these men of paint would botch 
on canvas. But both musicians and artists have a 
vision that is greater than their product. The soul 
of a man can hardly be recorded in black and white 
keys. Nor can a little pigment which you rub upon 
your thumb be the measure of an artist. So I suppose 
that is the way also with poets. It is not to be 
expected that they can express themselves fully in 
words that they have borrowed from the kitchen. 
When their genius flames up, it is only the lesser 
sparks that fall upon their writing pads. It consoles 
me that a man should be greater than his achievement. 
I who have done so little would otherwise be so 
forlorn." 

"It's odd," I said, when he had fallen into silence, 
"that I used to feel exactly as you do. It stirs an old 
recollection. If I am not mistaken, I once wrote a 
paper on the subject." 

The boy smiled dreamily. "But if small persons 
like myself," he began, "can have such frenzies, how 
must it be with those greater persons who have 
amazed the world? I have wondered in what kind of 
exaltation Shakespeare wrote his storm in 'Lear.' 
There must have been a first conception greater even 
than his accomplishment. Did he look from his 



136 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

windows at a winter tempest and see miserable old 
men and women running hard for shelter? Did a 
flash of lightning bare his soul to the misery, the 
betrayal and the madness of the world? His supreme 
moment was not when he flung the completed manu- 
script aside, or when he heard the actors mouth his 
lines, but in the flash and throb of creation — in the 
moment when he knew that he had the power in him 
to write 'Lear.' What we read is the cold forging, 
wonderful and enduring, but not to be compared to 
the producing furnace." 

The boy had spoken so fast that he was out of 
breath. 

"Hold a bit!" I cried. "What you have said sounds 
familiar. Where could I have heard it before?" 

There was something almost like a sneer on the 
boy's face. "What a memory you have! And 
perhaps you recall this brown suit, too. It's ugly 
enough to be remembered. Now please let me finish 
what came to me this afternoon on the hill! Prome- 
theus," he continued, "scaled the heavens and brought 
back fire to mortals. And he, as the story goes, 
clutched at a lightning bolt and caught but a spark. 
And even that, glorious. Mankind properly ac- 
credits him with a marvellous achievement. It is for 
this reason that I comfort myself although I have 
not yet written a single line of verse." 

"My dear fellow," I said, "please tell me where 
I have read something like what you have spoken?" 

The boy's answer was irrelevant. "You first tell 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 137 

me what you did with a brown checked suit you once 
owned." 

"I never owned but one brown suit," I replied, "and 
that was when I was still in college. I think that I 
gave it away before it was worn out." 

The boy once more clapped his hands. "Oh, I 
knew it, I knew it. I'll give mine tomorrow to the 
man who takes our ashes. Now, won't you please 
play the piano for me?" 

"Assuredly. Choose your tune!" 

He fumbled a bit in the rack and passing some 
rather good music, he held up a torn and yellow sheet. 
"This is what I want," he said. 

I had not played it for many years. After a false 
start or so — for it was villainously set in four sharps 
for which I have an aversion — I got through it. On 
a second trial I did better. 

The boy made no comment. He had sunk down in 
his chair until he was quite out of sight. "Well," 
I said, "what next?" 

There was no answer. 

I arose from the bench and glanced in his direction. 
"Hello," I cried, "what has become of you?" 

The chair was empty. I turned on all the lights. 
He was nowhere in sight. I shook the hangings. I 
looked under my desk, for perhaps the lad was hiding 
from me in jest. It was unlikely that he could have 
passed me to gain the door, but I listened at the sill 
for any sound upon the stairs. The hall was silent. 
I called without response. Somewhat bewildered I 



138 PIPPINS AND CHEESE 

came back to the hearth. Only a few minutes before, 
as it seemed, there had been a brisk fire with a row of 
orange peel upon the upper log. Now all trace of the 
peel was gone and the logs had fallen to a white ash. 

I was standing perplexed, when I observed that a 
little pile of papers lay on the rug just off the end 
of my desk as by a careless elbow. At least, I 
thought, this impolite fellow has forgotten some of 
his possessions. It will serve him right if it is poetry 
that he wrote upon the hilltop. 

I picked up the papers. They were yellow and 
soiled, and writing was scrawled upon them. At the 
top was a date — but it was twenty years old. I 
turned to the last sheet. At least I could learn the 
boy's name. To my amazement, I saw at the bottom 
in an old but familiar writing, not the boy's name, but 
my own. 

I gazed at the chimney bricks and their substance 
seemed to part before my eyes. I looked into a 
world beyond — a fabric of moonlight and hilltop and 
the hot fret of youth. Perhaps the boy had only been 
waiting for the fire upon the hearth to cool to enter 
this other world of his restless ambition and desire. 

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writ- 
ing — ^let us confine ourselves now to sonnets and such 
airy matter as rides upon the night — doubtless, you 
sit sometimes at your desk bare of thoughts. The 
juices of your intellect are parched and dry. In such 
plight, I beg you not to fall upon your fingers or to 
draw pictures on your sheet. But most vehemently, 



THE PURSUIT OF FIRE 



139 



and with such emphasis as I possess, I beg you not 
to rummage among your rejected and broken frag- 
ments in the hope of recasting a withered thought to 
a present mood. Rather, before you sour and curdle, 
it is good to put on your hat and take your stupid 
self abroad. 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





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